The mining sector is supported by a plethora of non-financial corporates including equipment, consumables, and advisory services. The criticality of raw material supply for the security of economic growth is fueling upstream investment into the sector. Both established corporates and new players with technical specialties seek to gain market share in the growing industry and in need of market insights to find high value growth opportunities.

Technical data on assets is scarce but crucial to identifying high value targets for sales teams to focus their resources. Few asset level datasets are successful in keeping information up to date, nor can they deal effectively with data “noise” causing high priority assets to be under-represented with low value sales targets. Information can change quickly and sector reports from many data providers become stale shortly after their release. There are limited tools available to quickly identify growth opportunities and for managing risks using live granular data.

This creates challenges for the management teams tracking market size and in making strategic decisions on resource allocation which will maximize their return from a constantly evolving sector.

Pain Points

Senior staff members of the service and equipment provider meet regularly with their internal strategy teams and investment committees to assess the value of regional markets and individual growth opportunities in the Metals & Mining sector. The Sales team’s resources are directed to focus on top priority targets that are key to the success of the company. They often struggle to find reliable live information to make these decisions, and the sheer volume of data can cause crucial indicators to be lost amongst the noise.

The impact of business decisions made on stale data can lead to wasted resources, and data noise can lead to missed opportunities. Strategy teams have found it necessary to go to numerous external sources of information to gain a comprehensive picture of the market for its clients. Data extraction, cleaning and integration into regional analysis is required.  This is time consuming and increased the cost of data acquisition. This drives the necessity for a single data provider that can deliver a broad and deep set of capabilities, including:

• A live market sizing tool that could evaluate and compare the size of each market (country/region) based on asset level technical metrics including but not limited to: Mining Methods, Processing Methods, Primary Metal, Ore Capacity and Owner's financial performance.
• A comprehensive breakdown of assets that meet strict technical criteria within a market, listed by order of priority for the highest value targets based off client customized criteria.
• A summary of top Metals & Mining companies with high value opportunities to help prioritize sales efforts based on the projected value of potential deals.
• A sophisticated solution that can mitigate data noise and discover true growth markets using large volumes of evolving asset datapoints.
• A forecast of key drivers of market activity, including ore mined/processed, commodity production, and capital expenditure; all of which drive demand for equipment and services.
• Delivery of data, charts, and tables direct to Microsoft Office programs with live data for instant updates, offering customizable analysis and presentations, therefore saving time on research.
  
  

Strategic planning teams across a range of mining services in this company evaluated the S&P Capital IQ Pro platform and determined that the S&P Global Market Intelligence solution delivers on all their needs. 

The Solution

The Strategic Planning teams reviewed a range of capabilities, including the proprietary Metals & Mining solution, which provides deep mining sector data, research, analytics, and mining news in one integrated package. This includes data on worldwide exploration, development, production, mine costs, acquisition activity and commodity market forecasts. The market sizing tools deliver cleansed data into charts and tables directly into Excel, Word and PowerPoint for live benchmarking purpose and form a critical solution to their analysis. Primary workflows delivered were:

• Mining assets new business tracking
• Asset value assessment and prioritization
• Market sizing and resource allocation
• Product line market forecasting
  
  

	Tracking mining assets to uncover new business opportunities	The Metals & Mining solution on S&P Capital IQ Pro provides a comprehensive source of global mining intelligence, tracking 36,000+ mining properties and coverage of 4,500+ mining companies. The entire life cycle is monitored from exploration through to feasibility, development, and production to help firms guide their sales teams. Information includes: Stage of development and activity status Exact location Sub-contractors working on the project Technical engineering studies Mining and processing methods Capital invested and planned investments Size of the mine (ore processing and production) Owner contacts and financial performance
	Asset value assessment and prioritization	The client-criteria based customizable asset scoring model generates accurate assessments for asset value unique to client criteria inputs. The asset technical/operational driven metrics specific to the equipment or service sector is adjustable and provide accurate prioritization of assets.
	Market sizing and resource allocation	Ready-made markets assessment templates designed to utilize individual client unique asset level criteria helps to remove data noise and accurately assess regions. Direct comparison of regions and sub-regions provide critical insights on the allocation of resources to countries and companies with the potential to generate higher returns. The comprehensive coverage on the number of assets and the ability to customize quality assessment with updated live data ensures that high value Information could easily be generated on-demand.
	Product Line Market Forecasting	The Mine Economics dataset is developed by an internal research team that focus on delivering detailed forecasts for operational and financial performance of individual mining assets. These mine models are updated twice a year and provide forecasts for the key drivers of demand for mining equipment, which can be aggregated to present regional and global perspectives. The models include information on: Ore mined, open pit and underground Type of open pit and underground mining Ore processed tonnage and grade Intermediate products produced and tonnage Mine site costs broken down to fundamental inputs: labor, fuel, electricity & reagent costs Capital expenditure on sustaining and building a mine Energy source used by mine

Key Benefits

The Strategy and Business Development teams across different departments are benefiting from many aspects of the S&P Capital IQ Pro Metals & Mining solution:

• Broad coverage and high-quality data from one source reduce time and save money by removing the need to have multiple providers to gain a comprehensive picture of the market.
• Up-to date asset data with granularity on technical operation creates more reliable asset assessments and develop sophisticated ways to prioritize targets for the sales team.
• The Microsoft Office tools can integrate live data directly into reporting workflows, deliver timely data for customizable analysis and minimize time in building reports.
• Ready-made data cleaning and market sizing tools provide turnkey market assessment to facilitate timely strategic decisions in the fast- evolving markets.
  
  

Explore some of the datasets and solutions used in this case study.