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After a 22-year career in banking that took her from Sao Paulo to New York, London and Johannesburg, Ana Cabral was ready to regain control of her schedule, spend time with her children and become an investor.
While Sigma is finally producing and shipping lithium to key markets like China, Cabral is grappling with a lack of premium for her product, what she sees as “illegal” competition from players who don’t uphold similar human rights and safety protocols, and the need to secure long-term capital.
“There’s nothing special about the plant,” said Klemens Laschefski, a geographer and professor at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, who visited Sigma’s operations in Aracuai and made a documentary. Sigma seems to be “a speculative product that they want to sell at a higher price. That’s why they’re marketing with ESG, everything that the modern investor wants to hear.”
A Rio de Janeiro native, she worked at billionaire Jorge Paulo Lemann’s former investment bank Banco Garantia in the early 1990s before moving to rival Pactual. She then spent more than a decade based in New York and London before returning home. Undaunted, Cabral recalls asking her mother to watch her kids for a few weeks in 2016 while she went to Australia and China to study the industry. She ended up staying nine weeks and came back more convinced than ever.“I told the investment committee, ‘This is really gonna be the greatest thing we do or I must be blind,’” she said. “Because in Asia it’s like they’re living in a future that hasn’t arrived here yet.
BMO Capital Markets analyst Joel Jackson said completion of the mine’s next two phases could take longer than expected with potential cost escalation. He also sees no real price benefit for the company’s efforts to push its green credentials and traceability aspects of the product.
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