Tracks of influence: The Lobito Corridor | Fast Forward podcast season 2, episode 7 transcript

Full episode transcript 

Fast Forward, season 2, episode 7 transcript 

Andrea Hotter [AH]: This is the second part in Fastmarkets’ two-part special on Africa. If you didn’t listen to the last episode, go back and do that before you listen to this one. And if you did, then get ready for a trip through the Lobito Corridor on Angola’s Atlantic coast. I’m your host, Andrea Hotter, and this is episode 7, season 2 of Fast Forward. 

I am heading away from Luanda and I’m just arriving at the domestic airport to take a flight for a few days. Well, when I said that I suspected the new airport was a little bit more modern than the international terminal. I wasn’t wrong. It’s absolutely spectacular. It’s also very, very empty. The domestic terminal is the only part that’s open at the moment and the international terminal opens up in October. 

The idea is to phase in the flights gradually and get it right, but it is stunning. If the architecture’s anything to go by, they’re certainly on the right path. It’s just another demonstration that the city is growing and it’s trying to ensure that its infrastructure keeps up. 

I’ve just flown from Luanda, the capital of Angola, to Benguela, a coastal city in Western Angola along the South Atlantic Ocean. It’s the capital of Benguela province, and one of Angola’s most important economic hubs, especially for trade and transportation. We’re here because it lies just south of the port city of Lobito, which is a major terminus of the Lobito Corridor and the Lobito Atlantic Railway, a key route for exporting minerals from the interior of Africa. But for now, it’s time for bed, and tomorrow I’m going to explore. 

It’s early in the morning and I’m in the town of Lobito, which has a beautiful palm-lined peninsula with beaches, seafood restaurants and local markets. Lobito’s laid out in a really distinctive, almost crescent shape, and I have to say it’s stunning. I’m not sure what I really expected, but it really is absolutely lovely. 

It’s built on a sand spit and bay, which has incredibly calm waters that make it perfect for sailing, fishing and probably just relaxing. There are lots of fishermen going past in their boats up and down, taking their catch to the local markets. You can see the Portuguese influence in the architecture from the government buildings to the Art Deco homes. In fact, some of those old train depots and warehouses have been converted into cafes or cultural spaces. 

If you speak to the people here in Lobito, the port and railway define the town’s identity. A lot of the residents work in logistics, shipping or customs. Our first stop today is going to be the minerals terminal at the port. 

You can hear the activity behind me. It’s definitely the Atlantic Gateway at the very edge of Angola and the frontline of what could become one of Africa’s most important trade corridors. You can feel the energy here. New cranes, upgraded terminals. Freight being unloaded. But what makes this place special isn’t just the infrastructure, it’s the role it’s about to play. 

For years, African mineral exports have relied heavily on eastbound routes to Indian Ocean ports, often expensive, slow or politically risky. But the port of Lobito, the minerals terminal here, is flipping the map. It offers a shorter, faster route west with direct access to Europe and the Americas. And because of the Lobito Corridor, the rail and road system that it anchors, it’s now positioned to serve not just Angola, but an entire inland economy. Copper, cobalt, manganese, lithium, one day. They’ll move through this port, but so might agricultural exports, refined metals, maybe even Angola-made batteries in the future. 

It is not just a port. It’s becoming a strategic asset in the global race for critical minerals and African development. And here on the docks, as I watch a fishing boat go by, you can feel it. This is where global demand meets African supply, where infrastructure meets opportunity. So now I’m going to take a walk around the port and see what’s going on. 

I’m wearing a hard hat, big boots that are far too large for me, and a luminous yellow safety vest, so stylish. First, I’m going to chat with Nicolas Gregoire, who is the Chief Operating Officer of the Lobito Atlantic Railway. 

Nicolas Gregoire [NG]: We’ve got a 100 wagons new coming from China. And today we received already 112 new wagons from South Africa. So we are really building the capacity now. We are running 13 train sets of 15 wagons on the international business. So we’ve got 13 train sets running all the time, but it’ll increase to 21, 22 before the end of the year. So we will double the capacity. 

AH: What are you mostly shipping in and mostly shipping out at the moment? 

NG: Out is copper, copper cathode and on imports, it has been mainly sulfur. 

AH: Right, for the refining. 

NG: And some no, and one train, I will not say some, we did only one train of food product for Carrinho which is a big Angolese company here. 

AH: And that will increase over time. 

NG: That was a test train, which was not too bad. 

AH: And what about theft? You hear about ships being stripped of things, barges, but what about trains? 

NG: This is exactly the reason why we want to do only containerized cargo, because today the containerized cargo is done door to door, but we’ve got security in all the stations when the train is blocked or when there’s an incident. We’ve got security that are taking care of the train. We’ve got guards in the loco all the time, but the best way would be containerized business. That’s really what we want to achieve because there’s no risk of impact on the environment. There’s no risk of security, less risk in safety and need to reverse. Take two hours, in fact, to have one train here in and out. With containers. With containers. Because the containers will be offloaded and then we put out the containers and the train can leave. With bulk, it takes more time. 

AH: As I’ve been chatting with Nicolas, a vessel is getting closer and closer, so I’m gonna ask someone to tell me what’s on it. 

José Madaleno [JM]: My name is José Madaleno. I am the procurement and logistic manager at Lobito Atlantic Railway. We are expecting the vessel that arrived with 525 containers that come from China. This is an acquisition that had the participation of Mota-Engil. They found a good supplier in China to supply us with these containers. So, this is a great event for us today because it’s the second vessel that arrives in this port. The first one was the container that came with sulfur that came from Qatar. So that container will be used for the transport of the sulfur that will arrive soon. 

AH: So you’ll keep these permanently? These will be for you to use for whatever comes in and out and whatever you ship up and down the railway. 

JM: Exactly. So this is the first batch of containers. We bought 1,517 containers. 

AH: Fantastic. And you can hear the fishing boats going past. Guessing they go back and forth all day with the…  

JM: They will prepare good food for us, I’m sure. 

AH: Perfect. I love it. I love it. And how big is this vessel? I have no idea. It’s massive, isn’t it? 

JM: This vessel is huge because it came not just with the containers, but with equipment. Because when we load the containers, it goes to Luanda to put out other goods that come there. Inside that, I believe are trucks and so on that come from China for other suppliers. Okay. Not for us. 

AH: As you just heard, it’s not just what’s going out, it’s also what’s coming in. I’m watching a container ship come into the port, inching towards shore, like a floating city. It’s gonna be bringing in containers, which will then be filled with sulfur bound for the refining copper sector in the DRC. It’s going to be loaded from this vessel and then transported via the Lobito Atlantic Rail. You can now hear the cranes, the trucks, the people arriving. There’s a sense of excitement building as the ship comes in. 

There’s a lot of activity at the port right now because they’re moving these containers. They’re gonna take them to fill them with the sulfur. Once they’ve got the sulfur, they’re going to be transferred by rail to the Democratic Republic of Congo, and when they get there at the copper sector, they’re gonna be unloaded. The sulfur will be removed and replaced with copper, which will then follow the same path all the way back to here where it started, and then be loaded onto other vessels headed for Europe and the United States. So it’s interesting to know where that copper’s going as well. 

Just taking a look inside. One of these are empty containers, 20 square feet, a little bit echoey, very clean inside, kind of feels like a garden shed, just a little bit bigger. 

While the containers are being unloaded, I’m asked if I’d like to see a railway safety training session. I can tell things in the terminal are going to take a while, so I say yes and head over to the car. 

So we’ve just pulled up at a fire station and there are a couple of fire engines sitting in the corner and a whole load of gorgeous, little, cute school kids. I’m not really sure what’s going on, but I guess we’re just about to find out. The children walk over from the fire station and head into the building that I’m now standing in. 

So there’s about to be a party here. The idea is to train the children to understand the risks of walking on railways, how the railways work, give them a little bit of a history. But there’s a lunch, there’s a singer with a song. There’s gonna be a whole lovely little school class. So I’ve walked into a party. 

It turns out that there’s a singer who also works at Lobito Atlantic Railway, who’s written a song about safety that has become very popular and pretty famous across the region. 

That was a lot of fun, but there’s a serious side to it all. The words of the song talk about safety and warn against walking on the rail tracks or removing anything from them because it can be dangerous. And also about preserving the railway for the community to benefit in the future. 

So Dina, what were they saying in that song? 

Dina: They are saying that this is the railway from Benguela and that this is the Lobito Corridor and they must preserve it. Don’t walk on the rail line, don’t get trash in the line. And the most important, to preserve the line because this is very important for Benguela and for the country. Yeah. And they repeat this all the time. 

AH: It was very catchy. I’m singing it in my head still. 

AH: I am back at the Minerals terminal now, and I’m going to take the opportunity to have a longer chat with Nicolas to learn more about the railway and what is happening here. I decided to ask Nicolas about the history behind the railway and how we got to where we are today. 

According to Nicolas, the Benguela Railway operated until the 1970s and was the main import-export route from Katanga in the DRC. The line was halted and then completely destroyed during the Angolan Civil War. When the war ended in 2002, the government decided to rebuild the railway, which a Chinese company then did. Angola’s CAB, a state-owned company, initially managed the 1,300 kilometers of rebuilt track, and then the government decided to hold an international tender to operate the railway and mineral terminal. 

NG: And then they launched a tender in ‘21 and the consortium signed the concession contracts in November ‘22, and we started the 25th of January ‘24, the operation. 

AH: Okay. Who are those partners in that consortium? 

NG: The consortium is composed of Trafigura with 49.5%, Mota-Engil 49.5%, and 1% for Vecturis. 

AH: Okay, perfect. So obviously now you are running one of the most geopolitically visible railways in Africa. When you take a step back, what’s the big picture here? What are you trying to achieve? What’s the point of this railway? 

NG: What we want to achieve is to offer a new corridor option for the minerals from DRC, a new, shorter and cheaper solution for export and import minerals, but also other cargo from Lobito to DRC, from DRC to Lobito. 

AH: What has been the hardest part about rehabilitating it and getting it up and running and making it fit for that purpose? 

NG: There were many challenges because we have taken over an activity almost from scratch. The main challenge was to put in place an operation to be able to start safely. I mean, there’s a lot of regulation in Angola. There were a lot of recruitment to be done from the CAB from the port of Lobito. The compliance was very important that we can start safely running trains, our own cargo trains, but also to ensure a safe operation of the passenger trains that remain the responsibility of the CAB, the state-owned company here in Angola. 

AH: What is it that you’re going to be transporting on this line? 

NG: Our main flow on export from the Katanga region is mainly copper, all types of copper cathodes, blister, or some concentrate. This is our main flow of exportation. There’s no restriction on the type of minerals. I mean, cobalt is a high-value commodity, but it’s a very low volumes compared to the copper. So we aim first at the biggest volumes, which is the copper. And then on the import side, we are importing sulfur that’s necessary for the mines to work. But we are also aiming at transporting some general cargo. We did already one train of food products for a big company here in Angola, so exporting food. And in the future it will be probably as well fuel, lubricants, any of the other equipment that we can bring to DRC for the need of the Katanga regions. We need to develop also the domestic market in Angola, also transporting fuel, gas, cement, food products, that’s also important for the development of Angola. 

AH: And anybody can use this line, right? It’s open access. It’s not restricted because obviously there are different companies. You mentioned Trafigura, they’re a trading company. I think there’s a bit of a misconception that it’s their line, that therefore it’s just for their product. That’s wrong, right? 

NG: That’s completely wrong. I mean, it’s a non-exclusive concession contract and all customers that are interested in transporting with us, we will take on board. 

AH: And obviously with the rhetoric that we hear a lot of, the decoupling of supply chains from China, that includes China as well. They can still use the railway. I’m sure that they are. 

NG: For sure, and they already are because they are one of the main actors in the business in DRC. 

AH: Another misconception seems to be that the line already goes into Zambia. Now that’s not true, is it? Right? 

NG: The Zambia link that we are all hearing about is building a new greenfield project that would link our railway around Luena around 1,000 kilometers from here to Jimbe at the border, and then to Kitwe, Zambia, but this is a greenfield project. We are not involved in that project. Now, for us, it could be just additional volumes, which would be a challenge, but a challenge that is always interesting. So we are looking at it. This is not included in our business plan. We did not aim at getting the Zambian volumes on the railway. But if one day in 10 years from now it’s happening, then that would be good news for us. So we’d have to manage the capacity of the railway to be sure that we can add additional volumes to the ones that have already been taken into account in the model. 

AH: What is success gonna look like for you? What’s the plan in terms of capacity expansion, all of that kind of thing?  

NG: Now if you look five years from now, what we would like to do is to achieve 1 million tons of export, 1 million tons of import, and probably 500,000 tons on the domestic market. That’s what we aim at. And what we aim at is achieving a railway that’s running safely with a high productivity, which means with a cycle time that would be very low. And also to add value to the local market here in Angola, and to grow our local staff and for them to take over some of the key management positions in the coming years. 

AH: Talk me through what you’re doing in the DRC in terms of the company and its activities there. 

NG: Yes, of course, Angola is one big part with 1,300 kilometers, but on the other side we’ve got 450 kilometers from the border to the Kolwezi region where we’ve got the dry port. We’ve got a track access agreement with them that allows us to transport our train from the border to Kolwezi keeping SNCC as operator, but using our own hauling stock. On the international business, we are running 15-wagon trains with a capacity of around 600 tons per train. So we put around between 40 and 44 tons per wagon on this train. But we are aiming to go to 20 wagons. That’s our first phase, 20 wagons, because that’s the length of around 400 meters for the train. And then we can organize a crossing within each of our stations. In the future, with the increase of the volumes, we could have a constraint of capacity in terms of the number of trains per day. Then our intention is to go to 50 wagons per train using two locos. But that would be more or less one kilometer. And for that, we need to invest in extending all the passing loops in all the 57 stations that we’ve got on the main line. So that’s our vision for year 5, 6, 7, depending on the increase of the volumes. 

AH: Okay. And these aren’t trains that are going like speeding bullets. So how long does it take to go that distance to get there? 

NG: So from here to the border is 48 hours. Today, we do it in 43, 44 hours. And then on the other side is between 36 and 48 hours because the speed is lower on the DRC side, but it’s between two days and two days to reach the terminal. 

AH: A lot of rhetoric that I hear is that the US is involved with this project, so can you maybe explain how all of that fits together? 

NG: Today the project is financed fully by the shareholders. So we have been spending probably like $200 million on the project and it’s fully financed by the shareholders. The wagons that you have been seeing, the containers that you saw here, the recruitment, and the OPEX cost is financed by the shareholders, and we are in the process of trying to mobilize the financing because we have got a big investment program to do so. And we are discussing now with DFC and DBSA from South Africa to put in place a financing, but that will be a credit. It’s not an investment from DFC or from DBSA. It’s a financial credit over a period of time, 10 years or 15 years, that we are currently negotiating with them. 

AH: Right. Okay. And the US loan that was coming in, or the credit from the US, has that been dispersed yet? The funds or the funds have not yet come in? 

NG: No. Not yet, it is under negotiation, under discussion. So that’s why I’m saying that the shareholders are fully supporting the project for now. 

LAR is a 100% Congolese company that was created 2 years ago. Now, 900 people are working for that company. We just have different shareholders and the Congolese government has a golden share in the company now, and they have a board representative that is sitting on the board of LAR. So we are really working in Angola with the Congolese company with a majority of probably 98% of Congolese staff. 

AH: Wow. Well, I met one of your staff yesterday. I went to one of your workshops with the kids at the schools, and I couldn’t believe that you had this fantastic singer there teaching these children. And he’s in the technical team here as well. Is that right? 

NG: Yes. He’s working at our local workshop. 

AH: Yeah. And it was all, the focus was on safety. Massively important. 

NG: Yeah. Safety is important and we make a big difference between occupational safety and railway safety because in a normal company, we are taking care of occupational safety, which is very important for us as well. But on our side, running a railway over 1,300 kilometers, we need to speak about railway safety. 

AH: Yeah, I thought it was fantastic. The children were just loving it as well, which was great. Brilliant. 

It has been a really interesting day watching the vessel come in early with its containers on board, witnessing a pretty unique safety lesson in action and seeing the vessel unloaded. Tomorrow is another early start, this time to dig deeper into a critical part of the Lobito Corridor, which is the Lobito Atlantic Railway we’ve been hearing about. So goodnight for now and I’ll chat with you in the morning. 

It’s very early in the morning and I’m waiting for the Lobito Atlantic Railway to arrive, and guess what? I’m gonna have a ride on it. Now, you might be thinking, isn’t this just a railway? But let me tell you, the Lobito Corridor is so much more than that. Yes, it includes a historic railway line, and yes, it’s been completely overhauled with modern trains, faster cargo handling, and better logistics. But here’s the bigger picture. The Lobito Corridor is becoming a new economic lifeline for the continent. It connects some of the world’s most mineral-rich regions – host to copper, cobalt, rare earths and lithium – with global markets. 

These are the minerals we need for electric vehicles, batteries, magnets and wind turbines. The building blocks of the future economy. It’s not just about shipping out raw materials. The corridor is attracting new investment zones, industrial hubs, power projects and jobs, stretching far beyond just the tracks. Think local processing, regional trade and stronger African supply chains. And for the US, the EU and African partners, this corridor is also a strategic alternative to existing routes dominated by other powers, giving countries here more leverage and more options. So yes, I’m reporting live from a railway, but in truth, I’m standing on a future corridor of influence: economic, environmental and geopolitical. This is Africa building new paths, not just rails, it hopes, but also new possibilities. 

Well, that’s the sound of the train coming into the station, and guess what? I’m about to get on it. It’s full of copper, but I’ve been very lucky. I’ve been allowed to get into the carriage with the driver, so let’s see how that goes. 

I’m on board a Lobito Atlantic Railway freight train riding west through Angola, and right behind me, the train is carrying tons of copper cathodes from the Democratic Republic of Congo. The copper was mined and processed in the Copperbelt, loaded up in the DRC, and now it’s headed all the way to the Atlantic port of Lobito, to the minerals terminal we were at yesterday, where it’ll be transferred onto the MSC Elizabeth, a container ship waiting to sail for Barcelona. This train isn’t just carrying copper, it’s carrying a message that Africa’s infrastructure is changing, that the world’s future industries depend on what starts here and that this corridor, these very tracks, matter. The ride itself is a little bit hot, a little bit dusty outside, and as you can tell, it’s also very loud. The traffic’s going past on the road as we’re going through. There are people going about their day-to-day business, men and women sitting on the side carrying baskets, walking past all kinds of activity on a Saturday morning. 

I think I’m pretty much living every small child’s dream right now. 

AH: What was once a colonial-era railway is now part of a critical minerals corridor linking mines in central Africa with global clean energy supply chains. I wish I could speak with the driver, but they don’t speak any English and I definitely don’t speak any Portuguese. Wow. There’s another young man on the train, in the carriage. There’s the guy who does the paperwork, the driver and a security guard here who doesn’t speak any English, but just demonstrated what he does by pulling down a very large gun. I’m not gonna be messing with him then. 

You can see little children running across the field trying to get here in time for the train. Not to get on it, just to watch it. 

Just coming into the final destination of this train in Lobito. I can see the forklift trucks ready to take the copper in the containers to load it onto the vessel. 

That’s it. That’s it. The train’s done its job. Now it’s time for the containers to take over. 

The copper and I have made it. I’m standing at the port of Lobito back at the minerals terminal where rail meets ocean and this long, dusty journey from the DRC starts the next chapter by sea. The copper’s gonna travel faster by sea than it did over land, which alone says a lot. What’s happening now is that the copper from the train is being unloaded from the wagons and moved to the terminal where it will be loaded onto the vessel. 

Every bundle is headed for the hold of the MSC Elizabeth bound for Barcelona. The transfer is fast, mechanical, very well practiced. Somehow it still seems a little bit surreal. This copper started in Central Africa’s copper belt, crossed by rail here, and now it’s on a ship that will carry it across the Atlantic. From here, it’s gonna enter the global markets, the battery plants, the wire factories, the clean energy infrastructure. They’re all waiting for this metal. 

You can tell my throat’s a little bit dry. I think that’s from being in the dust whilst we were waiting for the train. The front carriage of the train that I was in with the driver is here and it’s being linked to the empty wagons to take them away. Now the containers have been unloaded. The train sounds like it’s about to move. I have a feeling I’m gonna hear the sound of that massive horn, and this time I’m standing right next to it outside the train. I know it’s gonna really make me jump. 

Oh my word. 

It was bad enough inside. Now that was just gonna ring in my ears for the rest of the day. That would certainly wake you up. And off it goes. And there go my eardrums too. 

As I’m watching the activity at the terminal, I’m thinking less about the cargo and more about the question every country along this route must be asking: how do we stop just exporting raw materials and add more value in-country? That’s the question that will shape the next decade of African trade. From copper to cobalt, oil to agricultural exports, the real prize isn’t just to move more goods, it’s to move up the value chain. It’s something I plan to discuss with Will when I get back. 

I am now at Luanda Airport. It’s the older one that I came into a week ago, and I’m about to begin my long journey back to the United States. It’s been an incredible week. So interesting, so different. Just can’t believe I got to experience some of the things I did. What a wonderful country and what a great summit. So, looking forward to sharing more of these thoughts with you all. 

So I am back now and as ever, I wanted to just chat with my colleague Will. Hi, Will. How you doing? 

William Adams [WA]: Yeah, good. Thanks, Andrea. Very good, and sounds like you’ve had a fantastic time. 

AH: Yep. Really, really great and so much to dig into. But I thought it’d be really interesting to maybe really focus to start with on that question about what Africa can actually do to change its situation and stop exporting but add that value that it really does seem to want to add. 

WA: Yeah. So, I mean, it is interesting. It also needs to happen. It’s not just nice to have. Say if you take something like lithium, if you were to export a thousand tons of spodumene, within that spodumene, there’s only sort of like 80 tons. It means you are either shipping or transporting 80 trucks worth of spodumene or just two trucks worth of lithium of some sort. So it does make economic sense as well. But to get there, an awful lot needs to happen and some of them are gonna take a long time to come about. And I think one of the things is to be able to move from a concentrate material into a processed material, you do need good logistics. Obviously, this has helped with that. You need good infrastructure though as well. You need access to reliable energy, which is reasonably cheap and green as well. 

And you also need a skilled workforce, and that’s the thing that can take a lot of time to build up. Plus the companies need the know-how as well. So one of the big issues we have at the moment in processing is so much of processing, especially in the critical minerals, is done in China and they have a lot of that know-how, and it does take time for that know-how to be learned by other countries and other workforces. So those are all issues as well. Plus you’ve also then got to have a country which is set up for external companies to invest in there. So you need investors to feel safe that they are investing money in plant, in factories there, and that their investments will be safe. And then the other thing is you need the people to be on side as well. So you need the local people to be on side, which is important. 

AH: Yeah. It’s really easy when you list it like that to understand why governments default to just permitting exports rather than tackling these systemic deficits that they really do need to address. And I think the other thing you really hit on there is investing in processing capacity. Often when you have these situations where countries just suddenly decide to ban something, but then the smelting capacity or the processing capacity isn’t ready, it tends to backfire because you are banning something, but then you’re going to have to wait for the plants to be built. So it seems better and much more credible to have a situation where export bans are working because they are phased in and they’re backed by that infrastructure you are talking about. We’re starting to see that a little bit more now though, aren’t we as well? Zimbabwe is probably a really good example of that with lithium. 

WA: Another country that’s been really good at that is Indonesia. And they have said many times, okay, well in 3 years’ time or 4 years’ time, you’re not going to be able to export your copper concentrate. You’ve gotta build a smelter here. And I think that’s a much more reasonable and workable solution to these things. But again, if the money’s not coming from within, then you need foreign investors to feel comfortable there. 

AH: Definitely. And that policy consistency is really important, but I think it’s also politically hard when governments face these really quite urgent fiscal needs. So they rely on mining royalties and taxes, and then exporting raw ore provides that immediate cash flow while beneficiation, as we’ve been saying, takes years of investment, policy consistency, so it’s also quite easy I think for companies to resist these requirements by threatening to delay or cancel their projects. They can walk away much more easily than governments can, in other words. And I think governments often compete with each other for this foreign direct investment, and that means they kind of back down to avoid scaring off capital sometimes too. 

WA: You know, Gabon seems to be doing it pretty well at the moment. They have, I think, looked around, seen the lessons from elsewhere. They are phasing in. They’re kind of a good blueprint. They’re obviously the world’s second biggest manganese producer that set this 2029 deadline for banning raw ore exports, but they’ve already got that metallurgical complex at Moanda. They’ve got a hydroelectric dam there. They’re producing alloys and refined manganese. So they’ve given a long runway and they are co-financing these new processing projects with their partners. And I think that sequencing really helps and matters and it tells investors, this is real and you’ve got time to adjust. So they’ve thought before they’ve leapt almost. 

AH: You know, it does look like things are taking shape more and more, but you can’t do these things in a hurry. It does take time. You mentioned that infrastructure and obviously the Lobito Atlantic Railway is really important in helping solve one of those pieces of the puzzle. It’s gonna significantly cut journeys, isn’t it? 

WA: Yeah, so it’s four days, I think, two days within Angola, and then two days into the heart of DRC. Whereas if you truck things, you’ve got the Port of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, that’s about a 15-day trip there, and a lot of border crossings. There’s lakes to cross and things like that. So it’s not easy, and that all adds cost to the exporting. And if you are shipping a concentrate, say again, let’s use the idea of spodumene, it’s only 8% lithium content in there, so an awful lot of material that’s having to be shipped. And if you go down to South Africa to Durban, then it’s probably a 20-day trip down there. So being able to put these things on a train with a four-day… I mean that helps everybody, helps the mines’ cash flow, everything gets to market quicker. It’s gonna be greener, it’s gonna be more efficient, it’s gonna be safer if things are in a container. So yeah, it ticks lots and lots of boxes. It certainly will help make those trade routes more secure, they’ll speed them up and that will also then improve the economics of these projects as well. 

One question I have is who is behind the Lobito Corridor Railway? 

AH: LAR is the railway company. They’re completely independent as a company, but they are made up of Trafigura, Mota-Engil, which is basically in engineering and logistics and so on, and they do a lot of work in Africa, and Vecturis, which is involved in the railway sector. Trafigura and Mota-Engil have 49.5% each. And Vecturis has got 1%, but they are managed independently in Angola. Trafigura doesn’t have anything to do with their day-to-day, and I think that’s really important to remember. As Nicolas says, the railway is there for everybody to use. It’s being used by the Chinese, it’s being used by the West. It’s completely agnostic as to who uses it. So I think a lot of people see it as a Western-run railway, but it definitely is not. 

What’s your view on the approach at the heart of the last couple of podcasts, China versus the West? It’s an interesting one. How do you see them fitting into this whole, how does Africa advance? Because they do seem to come in and get on with it, China. 

WA: Yeah, I think China’s got a very big footprint there already. I think as we see what they do in China as well, Chinese do things differently. They have different business models. They have access to cheap finance. If the government is behind it, then the money’s there as well. They can operate much quicker and turn things around much quicker. So the West has a really big, it’s almost a barrier to entry ’cause the Chinese can do these things and then they can produce the finished products very cost-effectively, very competitively. So the West is making those inroads into these things, but it’s still going to need a lot of support and China’s not gonna just sit back and let the West take market share as well. I’m sure they’re gonna be fighting for that as well. So yeah, there’s a lot happening. 

AH: It’s interesting that we just mentioned that China-West tug of war, Will, because next time we are gonna be exploring how Chinese companies are responding to the West’s critical minerals approach more broadly. 

WA: Oh wow. Okay. That’s gonna be an interesting, big subject. 

AH: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. So Will, it’s been great to chat as always. Thank you so much for your very super smart insights. 

WA: No, it’s been a pleasure as always. Thank you very much. 

AH: This has been the second in a two-part special of Fast Forward by Fastmarkets. Thank you for traveling with us. And if you’d like to learn more about Fastmarkets, visit fastmarkets.com/podcast. 

Fast Forward is a Bearded Fellows production for Fastmarkets. Your host was Andrea Hotter with William Adams.