Welcome to CMM’s Newsletter,

In this edition we make the case for why Mongolia's three-decade absence from London is finally coming to an end, and why investors should meet this market now, before the listings arrive rather than after.

The article below walks through what has actually changed, and why this time looks different.

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Mongolia has been absent from the world’s mining-finance capital for three decades. A listing, a mandate and a roadmap suggest that is finally changing.

London has, at one time or another, financed almost every resource economy on earth. Chilean copper, Kazakh uranium, Ghanaian gold: all have flags planted somewhere in the Square Mile. Mongolia, sitting on one of the world’s great mineral endowments, is the glaring exception.

The exceptions prove the rule. Rio Tinto, the mining giant, is arguably the biggest Mongolia play in London. Its most important growth asset is the Oyu Tolgoi copper mine in the South Gobi, controlled outright since Rio bought out Turquoise Hill in 2022. But buying Rio for Mongolia exposure is like buying a food conglomerate for the chocolate. Beyond that, the London roster is essentially Petro Matad, the oil explorer that listed on AIM back in 2008 and has flown the Mongolian flag there more or less alone ever since.

The rest of the Mongolia story has been told on other people’s exchanges. Its exploration and mining assets have historically listed in Toronto; two Mongolian gold miners, Erdene Resource Development and Steppe Gold, ranked among the TSX’s top performers last year. Sydney is taking a growing share, with a steady stream of Mongolian juniors heading for the ASX. The country’s biggest company by market capitalisation, Mongolian Mining Corporation (MMC), has traded in Hong Kong since 2010, and nearly $6 billion of Mongolian bonds trade in Singapore. Yet London, home to the deepest pool of mining and emerging-market capital anywhere, somehow ended up with the smallest allocation.

In January 2011, at the height of Mongolia’s boom (GDP grew more than 17% that year), the London Stock Exchange Group signed an exclusive strategic partnership to modernise and help run the Mongolian Stock Exchange. LSEG placed managers in Ulaanbaatar, installed its MillenniumIT trading engine and put a generation of brokers and regulators through its academy. The technology worked; the market around it did not yet exist. With a handful of active brokers, no institutional investor base and minimal free float, the MSE got a Formula 1 engine before anyone had built the racetrack. The exchange’s real development would come more than a decade later, under local stewardship.

Then came the Tavan Tolgoi saga. For much of the 2010s, Mongolia planned to float Erdenes Tavan Tolgoi, operator of one of the world’s largest untapped coking-coal deposits, in a $3 billion IPO spanning Hong Kong, London and Ulaanbaatar. Banks were mandated, prospectuses drafted; elections happened, coal prices moved. By 2017, the government was telling Nikkei that an international IPO was “no longer needed.” London shrugged and moved on.

Two attempts, two lessons: infrastructure without issuers is a showroom, and a single mega-asset IPO is hostage to a single moment of political and commodity alignment.

Three things. For once, Mongolia is not coming to London with a single asset and a promise. It has several compelling stories to tell at once…