Hello there and welcome to the Fast Markets Live Lounge, brought to you thanks to Aquitech, and we are recording this live on location at the Lithium Supply and Battery Raw Materials Conference here in Las Vegas. Now, I'm Georgia Tully, and joining me on our sofas today is Dale Henderson. He is Managing Director and CEO of PLS. Now, they are one of Australia's leading lithium producers and a key player as well on the global stage. Dale joined the company in 2017. That was when he was Chief Operating Officer, and he played a key role in transforming PLS from a project developer into an ASX50-listed producer. Since stepping into the CEO role in 2022, he's led the company through expansion, market volatility, and some very bold strategic moves, including downstream partnerships and technology investments. We're going to explore his journey, his leadership insights, and what the road looks like ahead for lithium. Dale, thank you very much for joining us today.
So, I hear congratulations are in order. You have won Leader of the Year in our awards ceremony. Tell me what recognition like that means for you.
Yeah, very well surprised and humbled to receive that award, and obviously there's some amazing nominations there. So as I say, very humbled, and yeah, a delight. And in terms, you know, in terms of my acceptance speech, I made the point that, you know, leadership's a team game, and, you know, my team's amazing, and, you know, everything PLS has managed to achieve has been through them and will be through them. So really, I'm just very grateful for the role I can play contributing to that team, and look, yeah, wonderful to have an accolade like this, and it's credit to them, not so much me.
How did you first get into the resources sector?
Yeah. Well, out of uni, I joined a broad engineering company. And through that I went out into a coal project of all things. Was my first foray into resources. And since then, always stayed in resource companies, but of different kinds, including some iron ore in Australia, some oil and gas in the Middle East, some LNG back in Australia, magnetite, and of course my latest chapter has been lithium.
Is there a sort of a constant thread there? Are many of the, as much of the skill set the same?
There is definitely a common thread in terms of being involved in extracting a resource and concentrating or processing it and then transporting it. That would be the common element. Everything else obviously is different.
Okay. So at what point did you decide that you really wanted to lead one of these companies? You wanted to move into the sort of management role, and how easy was it for you to make that transition?
I think during the course of my career, the thing which was probably the constant is I was always drawn into the biggest challenge wherever that was, wherever I was working, and that's what I really enjoyed. Whatever the crisis of the moment was or a big thing to be solved, I really yearned to be in that, and through that I naturally sort of moved up the ranks. So it was never a case of I wanted to be a particular leader or something, it was just more being drawn on about, gee, that project looks really exciting, and sort of one thing led to another. So as it relates to being a CEO, I didn't really necessarily have that as a key objective in mind. However, of course, when, you know, as I graduated to COO, that type of idea sort of started to enter my head, and yeah, here we are.
Yeah. So you didn't have like a sort of driving desire to be in charge and be the boss and dominate?
Okay. So, but I mean equally you are now the boss, and obviously being CEO comes with rewards but also demands. I mean a huge amount of responsibility, particularly in such a volatile sector. I'd like you to cast your mind back if possible. Can you think of the sort of highs and lows for me? Any particular moments?
Yeah. Yeah. Well, as I think about being involved in resources companies generally, I've been through multiple cycles with multiple commodities, and the highs are always wonderful and the lows are always terrible. So I've seen quite a few lows over my years, and in oil and other places, but of course more recently in lithium. Well, we've had at least two sort of cycles of quite grim lows, and we're in the second. And as it relates to the last one, that was particularly challenging in 2019, 2020, and for PLS, well, it almost broke the company, and it was an incredibly difficult time for the whole team and a real fight for survival. But you know, those periods really, good stuff comes from that, and innovation and the need to be better because, yeah, you're literally fighting for survival. And yeah, we were lucky, and we did survive and sort of catapulted out of the other side. And as we moved into going from winter to spring, if you will, well, we made the most of that period, and as we moved through a high-priced part of the cycle, well, we went to work in terms of investing back into the business, and that's been a big part of setting ourselves up for where we are now, which is that next part of the cycle, which my view is ultimately will pass us, and spring will come again.
It's interesting that you have that perspective. People who are maybe newer to the sector or haven't got that mining background might not have that sense of perspective, might be feeling a little bit less optimistic. What would be your advice to them?
