The Northern Miner, first published in 1915, during the Cobalt Silver Rush, is considered Canada’s leading authority on the mining industry. Editor John Cumming MSc (Geol) is one of the country’s most well respected mining journalists. jcumming@northernminer.com
Walter Gretzky famously advised his son Wayne to “skate where the puck’s going, not where it’s been.” In the mining industry today, there’s no better exemplar of someone living that kind of wisdom than entrepreneur Ross Beaty, our selection as 2011’s Northern Miner Person of the Year.
Based in Vancouver, Beaty has been a driving force behind many wildly successful mineral explorers and junior mining companies over almost four decades, and has already been well-rewarded and recognized for his efforts. Over the last 25 years he has started 12 public companies and sold eight of them, converting about $1 billion of investment capital into shareholder wealth of more than $5 billion.
But 2011 was framed by two particularly sweet periods for Beaty: in January there was full fruition of the long-predicted blossoming of the silver market and the benefits created for silver miner Pan American Silver, which was carefully created and nurtured by Beaty in the nineties during the nadir of the silver market (and where he still serves as chairman); and, in the closing months of 2011, the almost too-easy grassroots exploration success at Lumina Copper’s large and growing Taca Taca copper-gold-molybdenum deposit in Argentina – the last major unsold asset left from the bundle of large copper deposits that Beaty and his team gathered under one corporate roof in 2003, similarly during a period of low copper prices.