The first 121 Mining Investment Conference in London on April 21st and 22nd has worked extremely well at an excellent new conference venue right in the City of London close to Liverpool Street Station. While the venue probably couldn’t support a really big mining event like Mines and Money, for the smaller scale meetings which the 121 Group is setting up it was ideal.
Briefly the idea of the 121 Mining Investment meetings is to conduct a series of invitation-only events designed to give participating paying junior resource companies a facility aimed predominantly at generating face to face meetings with investment professionals and thus is concentrating on audience quality rather than quantity. This means the conference is a much more relaxed event than many of today’s modern investment related events and all the better for that. While audiences are not huge they are very focused and most, if not all, paying participants are pretty fully occupied with these one-to-one meetings throughout the two days of the conference as well as having some good additional networking opportunities in the coffee and meal breaks and evening receptions.
To help attract the investment professionals, the conference organisers have brought in a host of highly rated speakers – both presenting individually, or as part of round table type panel discussions, covering a host of different resource sector aspects, and the London event – the 121 Group’s third after an initial one in Hong Kong last October, and a second in Cape Town in February – is also the largest to date with 32 participating junior resource companies. The overall vibe in this venue has been extremely positive.
Each paying participating company has its own private meeting space for the conference duration – in this case in the form of inflatable pods, or ‘igloos’ giving a bit of a space age feel to the meeting areas. Other conference sponsors have tables made available in the communal areas. Feedback from the participating companies with whom I have spoken so far has been extremely positive in that they have made some excellent connections.
Thus, this is something of a new style resource investment conference with a nice relaxed atmosphere, very different from today’s big mega investment events like the PDAC, Mines & Money and the Cape Town Mining Indaba, and does offer the paying participants what would seem to be excellent value in comparison.
The next 121 Mining Investment event will be held in Hong Kong in mid-October. See www.weare121.com for details.