Simon MacAllister

I think what we can expect is more volatility.

So certainly the numbers this year have been extremely noisy.

So from quarter to quarter, there's big movements up and down in individual sectors.

Certainly at this point in the year, we can look at the year to date rather than the change quarter on quarter.

And you've mentioned some of the big increases there.

So we've seen big increases in pharma and medtech is probably the biggest one.

A lot of that obviously driven by the dynamics in the U.S.,

But a lot of the other sectors have shown growth as well and important sectors to other parts of the economy like food and agri have grown year on year as well and services have grown as well, which obviously is a big contributor to the overall picture.

Yeah, so this is all about access to critical earths and minerals, which a lot of countries have realised are, you know, really, really essential to their overall economies.

And in particular to the growth in data centres, which is driven by the growth in AI.

And those critical earths and minerals are really important to a lot of the equipment that goes into data centres.

And countries want to have control over their data.

They want to have control over things like AI tools.

And to do that, they need to have access to those minerals.

But then it goes a lot wider beyond that as well, because those minerals go into a lot of really basic components that go into a lot of different products.

So everything from, you know, people talk about missiles and really exotic and complicated products, but all the way down to things like magnets, which go into a lot of different products.

that realisation has been dawning.

Those minerals are concentrated in very small number of countries.

Not all of them are countries that would be very stable politically or people that everyone wants to trade with.

And then secondly, the processing of those minerals is very, very concentrated.