FP Dealmakers: Critical minerals help drive dealmaking surge on Bay Street

financialpost.com:

Higher commodity prices and the rise of electric vehicles made the mining sector the star of the show for Bay Street’s dealmakers in the first half of the year, with investors particularly hungry for stock and debt in companies supplying copper.

Ryan Latinovich, global head of metals and miningat RBC Capital Markets, said interest in the sector has come from both seasoned investors and those who haven’t been exposed to mining before.

“(There is) very broad support (from) new investors who may not have as long of a history in mining, but get some of the green metals thematics that are a secular driver, and want to find a way to participate,” he said. “We’ve been very fortunate to be in a leadership role with many, if not all, the biggest deals on the copper side.”

The interest in mining — the sector has been at the centre of more than half the equity and equity-linked deals this year —  and a reinvigorated appetite for corporate debt helped produce 508 debt and equity deals worth $338.7 billion in the first half of 2024, according to figures compiled by FP Data, with deal count up 6.3 per cent and deal value up 32 per cent from the same period a year earlier.

On the debt side of the market, where the largest prospectus deals involved financial services companies with a smattering of telecom and energy players, buyers and sellers finally found common ground oninterest rate expectations.

“People realized, I think, that rates were probably going to stay higher for longer, and so there was a lot of demand from the buyer market for product,” said Andrew Parker, co-head of the national capital markets practice at law firm McCarthy Tétrault LLP. “And issuers, even though they saw rates potentially coming down, I understand from