Brisbane’s Mining 2007 conference attracted huge interest from investors and mining companies alike. The conference which this year celebrated its sixth birthday has already grown to become the east coast’s premier resource conference.

Vertical Events is the company behind the conference, and Managing Director Stewart McDonald maintains that the clear focus of Mining 2007 is the key to its success.

“The purpose of the conference is to promote mid-cap to small resource companies, both in terms of hard rock and energy,” Stewart says.

“It’s a forum to help them promote what they do, both in terms of their investors and to the industry. Diggers (Diggers and Dealers conference in Kalgoorlie) is the biggest resources conference in Australia, and that’s known on the global scale.

"This is a bit different to Diggers in that it hasn’t got the bigger companies, by choice. But it does have a strong investor focus, and in size it is the second biggest resource conference in Australia.”

CBH Resources was one of over 80 companies with a dedicated booth at the event, and general manager Greg Jones was in no doubt as to the conference’s value.

“It’s quite a different conference to the Diggers and Dealers, it tends to be much broader, it includes the energy stocks, which is quite interesting, and it also is open to the small punters, to the smaller investors, people that you don’t usually see in these larger conferences. So I think it’s quite unique in that sense and quite valuable to people like ourselves.”

This year’s organisers were pleased with the conference turn out, both from the Australian resources sector, and from the investment community.

“The investor interest has been high, because a lot of them are people who work from home, or on their computer, or they’re e-traders, or they work on charts,” Stewart says.

“And they don’t get a chance to see face-to-face a lot of people that they might own shares in. There’s over 200 CEOs here this week, and these investors have a chance to talk to them, face-to-face.”

While investors were given a chance to meet first-hand with the companies whose projects they finance, for the companies themselves it was a chance to publicise their latest ventures.

“D’Aguilar Gold is really a specialist generator of resource companies,” says Greg Runge, general manager of D’Aguilar.

“While company’s might initially look at us and think D’Aguilar has actually spread itself very thinly, because it’s looking at such a range of products; molybdenum, nickel, gold, copper, zinc, the reality is exactly the opposite. As an exploration group, we look at anything with geologists, but then as we develop any one project we become very focused.”

Metallica Minerals took full advantage of a conference in their own backyard.

“We’re a Brisbane-based company,” Metallica CEO Andrew Gilles says. “My background is in geology, I’ve been a geologist for almost 20 years, most of which has been in Queensland.

“Metallica’s core project is its flagship project, NORNICO, it’s an acronym for North Queensland Nickel Cobalt. It’s based up in the hinterland of Townsville. We’re very much a Queensland-focused multi-commodity resource company, with a nickel development focus.”

Stewart McDonald believes that the current mining boom and surging resources industry is the main reason behind the conference’s increasing size and importance.

“It has grown obviously,” Stewart says. “I mean, we started six years ago and the resource industry wasn’t so buoyant six years ago. So it’s had a natural growth because of the boom.

"And that natural growth is because of the development of the conference. And it’s become the eastern states’ equivalent of Diggers and Dealers. It’s very important for investors, fund managers, brokers and the industry to all get together.”

Pan Australian Resources’ Allan Ryan also believes that conferences such as Mining 2007 are important not just to spread news to investors, but for fellow resource companies from across Australia to be given the chance to talk to one another.

“Obviously the conference is in our home town, so that’s a great advantage for us,” Allan says. “But it’s a great opportunity to meet with investors, it’s a great opportunity to network with other juniors who are in a similar situation to us.

“At Pan Australian we are developing a major copper-gold project in Laos. We announced two days ago that we’ve brought the project forward by three months, which is pretty unusual in the case of resource companies at the moment. So we brought the project forward and also, we’re still within budget.”

Stewart McDonald concludes that human contact is of great importance.

“All you see on a computer is the facts and the figures and the market, but you actually get to talk to them, and to hear them, and perhaps understand their passion about why they’re doing certain things.”