CEO lunch with Peter Harold

PETER Harold is something of a stayer.

After 17 years at the helm of Panoramic Resources, he is one of the longest serving CEOs on the ASX, quite a feat given the volatility of the nickel industry where the business has been predominantly focused.

But that loyal streak is evident in many other facets of his life. He remains a keen Collingwood supporter because his family had a shoe factory there when he was growing up in Melbourne, under the direction of his father, Ian, a third-generation boot maker.

He still wears boots made by the brand, Harold Boot Company, which operates to this day.

However, it may have been the engineering influence from his mother’s side of the family that took Mr Harold’s attention away from footwear, and steered him towards resources.

After completing a degree in applied science in chemistry at the University of Melbourne, majoring in polymer technology, Mr Harold nearly ended up making blown-moulded polyethylene fuel tanks for Ford in Geelong, but instead joined Shell as a graduate trainee.

He spent three years at Shell in Melbourne, the first working in the LPG division and the rest as a fuel and lubricants engineer, before he had an itch to find a job with travel.

“I’d been on a trip overseas with my mates on holidays and just thought it would be great if I could find a job where someone paid for me to fly up the front,” he said.

As luck would have it, a chance sighting of a job advertisement for Perth-based Australian Consolidated Minerals via a recruitment agent he knew from school led him to take a day off work from Shell to fly west for an interview.

“I was still employed by Shell and there was a whole lot of blokes that I work with on the plane, so I had to sit down at the back of the plane with my newspaper,” Mr Harold said.

“They didn’t spot me and I got off the plane (but) driving to the city in the taxi, I pulled up at the lights at Burswood and there they were in the cab next to me.”

That was in March of 1989 and ACM was operating the Golden Grove copper, lead, silver, zinc and gold project.

Having impressed at the interview, Mr Harold was employed to market all the concentrate worldwide, including Germany, South Korea and Japan where ACM had contracts.

“I was traveling all over the world. I actually got almost too much travel. I think I was home in Perth, the first year, I spent three months in Germany working for our 10 per cent owner, doing sort of like an internship and I worked in the smelter department in the metals training department,” he said.

Towards the end of his three years with ACM, Mr Harold’s focus shifted to the company’s nickel operation at Mount Keith in the northern Goldfields.

In 1992, Western Mining and Normandy took over ACM; Western Mining took Mount Keith and Normandy took the gold assets.

Mr Harold briefly stayed with Normandy. However, when the company wanted him to transfer to Adelaide, he opted to join some former ACM executives in a new company, MPI Mines, back in Victoria, which had a mine in Stawell, a few hours west of Melbourne.

The move to Melbourne also coincided with Mr Harold getting married, although he said he always had an eye on getting back to Perth when MPI discovered Silver Swan, which became an underground sulphite-nickel mine in WA’s Goldfields.

When the nickel price collapsed at the end of the 1990s, the mine was sold off and Mr Harold found himself unemployed.

“I looked around and I knew some guys, a sort of mentor of mine called Chris de Guingand, who was later to become the chairman of Panoramic,” he said.

“He had a sort of trading company and he knew the guys at Centaur and they were looking for a marketing manager for the Cawse nickel and cobalt deposit project.

“We were selling nickel cathode and cobalt sulfite material to Belgium. I got a job there, which was one of the [Joseph] Gutnick companies and I did two years there working for a great bloke called Ken Hellsten, who was running that project.”

Despite being on time and on budget, the project was challenged by continuing weakness in the nickel price.

Again at a loose end, Mr Harold said he found himself talking to some of the key players in the Mitchell River Group investment consortium – Alasdair Cooke and Bill Clough – who were considering acquiring the Sally Malay nickel project in the Kimberley from Normandy Mining.

A consulting possibility turned into a full-time role as managing director – the same job he holds today.

“I commuted for around about six months backwards and forwards from Perth to Melbourne, Melbourne to Perth,” Mr Harold said.

“I didn’t get paid, but that was my kind of equity in it, to sort of do that.

“I used up all my Ansett frequent flyer points just before they went belly up.”

Those who know the story of Sally Malay Mining will recall its rocky start to life as an ASX company, due to list on the morning after the terror attacks on New York that brought down the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

“That was a nightmare and we actually were the first stock ever to be suspended before we were listed,” Mr Harold said.

The company’s Savannah project in the Kimberley relied on an offtake deal with Jinchuan Group, a big nickel producer that liked the copper and the cobalt in the concentrate. Mr Harold said the byproduct was key.

After commissioning Savannah in 2004, the company diversified with the purchase of a joint venture interest in the Lanfranchi project near Kambalda from Western Mining.

It was a period where little went wrong. The two mines were producing around 20,000 tonnes per annum between them and there were further discoveries that drove the share price above $6 as the commodities boom picked up.

It was around this time that the Sally Malay name didn’t seem to match the business and a company-wide competition ended up with the name Panoramic, coincidently the name of the street Mr Harold grew up on.

“It was a $5,000 prize and I donated it to charity,” he said.

“We wanted to have something that was a bit more big-picture; Panoramic sort of made sense.”

Mr Harold said he enjoyed being at the helm.

“I always wanted to run a business,” he said.

“I was always interested in business because of my dad running the shoe business. I was always fascinated by it, but I’d done a technical degree, which was a mistake … I probably should have done accounting or something.

“Anyway, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do while I was at school, so I did this degree and then sort of luckily got back into a corporate trade through the Shell graduate traineeship. So I went more commercial ... so that’s how I got all my commercial training, which was great.”

However, nothing really prepares any CEO for the market’s turn, which it did. The GFC took nickel down to about 20 per cent of its peak.

An attempt to diversify into gold had modest results.

Lanfranchi had all but run out when a seismic event brought on an early closure. Continuing poor prices eventually prompted the end of mining at the group’s original operation, too.

“We made a hard decision but we had to shut up Savannah as well, which is another 200 people,” Mr Harold said.

“So we’d gone from a business that was turning over $200 million a year and employing 450 people in August 2015 to May 2016 with 30 people and no cash flow, and share price had got to 7 cents.

“So we were just copping it from everyone. That’s just business, isn’t it?”

So what does Mr Harold think is going to happen with nickel?

“Well, I think what’s happened now, you’ve got a situation where of course markets always overshoot on the up and the down and nickel definitely overshot on the downside. In hindsight, no-one was making any money at $3.50 a pound.

“So if you thought nickel was going to be $3.50/lb it would be in the ground forever. Obviously nickel probably won’t be $3.50/lb. Then since that, what’s happened has been stainless steel demand has improved.

“And that’s been good, but the big thing that’s really driving the outlook for nickel is electric vehicles, nickel in the cathode.”