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To put this in the context of South Crofty, we also need to talk about costs. Today, Cornish Metals reckons the mine’s cost profile makes it a first-quartile asset within the global tin market, meaning most of the metal’s global production would need to already be unprofitable before any real worries set in for this specific case. Rewind to 1998, and things looked different. By crudely depreciating today’s AISC assumptions in line with inflation, we can see that the mine was simply unviable before the aftermath of the 2007-2008 financial crisis.

Our second chart drives this point home more clearly. It shows the difference between the tin price and that very-rough depreciated cost forecast taken from the preliminary assessment. Since the start of 2009, it has averaged just over 50 per cent, suggesting that the economics have been viable for a while.

For investors, it’s post-tax cash flow – not margins – that ultimately matters. But there are clearly other reasons (profit-oriented and with little regard for the fiscal multiplier or job creation in a deprived county) why NWF is comfortable to join the party now. One is existing infrastructure. High grades are a bonus, too. Then there’s permitting, these days perhaps the hardest thing to come by in any mining project anywhere, which is secured. Some of the risks you routinely find in similar projects aren’t there.

So, is the project set fair? Has this fundraising materially improved the risks and rewards for current and future investors?

On balance, I think the answer is yes. That doesn’t mean the next 12 months are without jeopardy. A global recession could clobber the tin market, upset the FID and force investors to take a contrarian bet on a price recovery. Another financing round will be required. Then there are the common-or-garden risks that come with getting a mining project back into production. If things can go wrong, they sometimes do.

Some might sniff at the participation of the NWF. To the cynical or wary, the sudden prioritisation of long-term domestic supplies of critical minerals – aside from muddying the state’s already muddy strategy in the North Sea – might seem like a passing fad. Eventually, this government or the next is going to realise quite how challenging this national security job will prove.

Others will see it as a subsidy for a project that harder-headed investors might avoid. When you’ve got billions to spray around, your due diligence processes might not be as exacting as a £100mn targeted fund. To wit: the day after the raise, NWF announced it had also committed £55mn to EV charging network provider Connected Kerb, a company that at the time of writing is still yet to file its 2023 accounts.

Part 2 ……

Tin is a critical mineral, that is essential for the energy transition and anything electronic,” he begins. “South Crofty is a strategic asset with the ability to responsibly provide a secure, high grade long-term supply of tin, reviving Cornwall's rich mining history and contributing to the local economy and the UK's transition to net zero”.

Nods to tradition, localism, national security, the government of the day’s economic priorities, climate change, and electrification – it’s all there. But aside from pride in a dormant historic industry, few of these themes would have even made it into a natural resources project pitch even a few years ago. For decades, mining has been viewed as something done at scale and out of sight, in a desert, a tundra or on a steppe. In any case, it was pointless trying to compete the abundance and cost competition of a globalised world.

In a small, densely populated country with a service-led economy, this went without saying. What’s more, it’s unlikely heavy industry was the sort of image the Cornish tourist board sought to cultivate. And yet, here we are in 2025, and enough planets have aligned to make South Crofty feasible once again.

The most vital of these planets, and the biggest answer to the question ‘why now’, is, naturally, pricing.

In its preliminary economic assessment of the project, published last May, Cornish Metals relied on a long-term tin price of $31,000 per metric tonne. Assuming a discount rate of 8 per cent, factoring in up-front capital costs, contingency funds, process plant upgrades in year four and all-in sustaining costs (AISC) of $13,661 per tonne, this would give the project a net present value of $264mn before tax.

As our first line chart shows, some might consider that $31,000 forecast a tad optimistic. Though the tin market briefly hit this level in 2011, amid an explosion in Chinese demand in 2011, it wouldn’t reach this price again until post-pandemic supply chain dislocations and skewed demand patterns sent it skyrocketing in 2020 and 2021.

Since then, it’s been a bumpy ride. Prices fell abruptly in the course of 2022, before rebounding due to improving demand and a raft of supply disruptions in Myanmar and Indonesia, two key producers.

While copper commands much more attention – owing to both its greater abundance, and its market being almost 100 times larger, on a per-tonne basis – tin isn’t short of a strong demand profile in the years ahead. Like copper, which many analysts expect to enter a supply deficit by the end of the decade, the tin market looks tight. According to Fitch Solutions, a dearth of new projects, coupled with growing demand for tin from manufacturers of consumer electronics, microchips, solar panels and electric vehicles could lead to shrinking stockpiles in the next few years. Perhaps $31,000 is reasonable.

Part 1

Last week, sandwiched between the market shocks of DeepSeek and tariff-bluff, the Aim-listed Cornish Metals (CUSN) managed to successfully raise north of £56mn to advance restart of the mothballed South Crofty tin mine in the village of Pool, near Camborne in Cornwall.

The equity injection, anchored by a £28.9mn commitment from the UK’s National Wealth Fund (NWF), is expected to get the company to a formal final investment decision (FID). Given the new funds are earmarked for de-watering, long lead items, site costs, land purchases and ‘early works’, it’s hard to imagine that the green light won’t follow, possibly as soon as this time next year.

Though the figures involved are teeny by the standards of global mining projects, and less than 1 per cent of the size of last year’s rights issue by National Grid (NG) – 2024’s biggest equity raise in London, intended to fund capital spending several orders of magnitude greater than a smallish tin mine – it’s still significant.

Strip out an acquisition-focused £249mn placing by Greatland Gold (GGP), and the £56mn committed by the government and long-time investor Vision Blue Resources (plus £1.4mn from retail investors) is bigger than any secondary placing on Aim in 2024. Considering the state of the junior market, and the lack of good news lately, that looks like a modest win.

Just ask Rachel Reeves. She may oversee a budget of more than £1tn, but a 5,000-tonne a year Cornish tin mine can still be marshalled in the effort to “kickstart our economy so that we can put more money in people’s pockets”.

Quite how many pockets – and whether they include those of shareholders (more on which later) is up for debate. But while this isn’t a third Heathrow runway, scale isn’t everything. For what it’s worth, Cornish Metals expects the mine to create 320 new jobs and support a further 1,000. The chancellor sees this as a flag in the sand for “the growth of the Cornish mining sector…and opportunity for the region and beyond”.

This is all welcome, of course. But with any capital-intensive project, investors must also consider the matter of timing. South Crofty, where tin has been mined for centuries, has been closed since 1998. For years until then – during which time my West Country-based colleague Julian Hofmann visited the mine on a school trip – depressed prices meant continued losses, which were only then papered over by the then-owner’s forced sale of surplus land.

So why the push to restart the mine now, after 27 years in which it did little more than fill up with water?

There are a few connected answers to this. Neatly enough, several can be found in the statement chief executive Don Turvey made to welcome the financing.

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