‘It takes a lot to knock me off course’

Jonathan Price learnt the biggest lesson of his career in his first job, working at a nickel refinery near his hometown of Swansea.

A fresh graduate with an Oxford degree in metallurgy, his role was to change how workers were making a new type of nickel-based material. It quickly became apparent the crew, some of whom had worked at the refinery for longer than he had been alive, had little interest in being told what to do. Price put himself on the night shift and, swinging spanners with the team, learnt that making change is “more about the people than anything else”. 

“It was great fun, but it was a great learning experience as well,” recalls Price, now chief executive of Teck Resources, a $22bn Canadian miner that is among the world’s top producers of copper and zinc. “I found myself doing the same thing 20 years later in the Pilbara or in the Bowen Basin . . . having to convince a general manager of a mining operation that changing the way they worked would lead to improvement.”

A 25-year veteran of the industry, Price has been running Vancouver-based Teck for the past two years, after joining as chief financial officer in 2020. As CEO, his early plans to reshape the company by splitting it into two businesses — coal and metals — were derailed in dramatic fashion by a $23bn hostile takeover approach from Swiss miner Glencore in April 2023.

Price suddenly had to steer Teck through one of the most aggressive and acrimonious merger attempts in the mining industry in years. Insisting it was a non-starter, he defended the company against Glencore’s bid.

Teck’s ownership structure helped stave off the unwanted advances — its supervoting shares are controlled by Norman Keevil, the company’s former chief executive and the son of its founder, who was fiercely opposed to the deal. Ultimately Teck did sell its coal business to a Glencore-led consortium later that year for $9bn, instead of spinning out the business to shareholders as originally planned. 

Price recalls the defence against Glencore as a “challenging time”, which involved nights in the office, leaving the phone ringer on at all hours, and talking to shareholders all over the world.

One of the biggest setbacks was when Teck was forced to cancel a shareholder vote hours before it was set to begin because it did not have enough votes to support its proposal to divide the company into two.

The period was the “next level of intensity”, Price says but it also drew his team together. He seems surprisingly tranquil when recounting the experience. “The most intense periods you have are also the greatest learning experiences,” he explains. “It takes a lot to knock me off course.”

Some of that resilience comes from tragedy. Price was orphaned, without siblings or close family, at 17, when both of his parents died from illness within months of each other. “Almost any event you can think of in a business or professional context is going to pale in significance, as compared to that,” he says. “It doesn’t mean I don’t address events that arise with great intensity, seriousness and hard work, because of course I do. But in terms of how I manage my stress, I think I’m able to maintain significant balance.”

Price also credits his parents with instilling in him the values of hard work and respect — something he realised after they passed away. “That was quite a formative event,” he says. “It changed who I am, certainly, but that has impacted the way I’ve I thought about my role, my leadership, the way I work throughout the rest of my career.”

It also spurred Price to attend university — his father never earned a university degree but prized education. An early obsession with bicycles, and the racing bike used in the 1992 Olympics by Chris Boardman, led him to study metals and metallurgy. 

At Teck, the world’s ninth-largest producer of copper and the third-largest producer of zinc, an industrial metal, Price is now realising a plan to use the proceeds from the coal sale to invest in its copper business. This includes expanding production at the Quebrada Blanca mine in northern Chile, and developing new greenfield mines in Mexico and in Peru.

“I like the process of change,” Price says. “That sort of change I enjoy, I thrive on.”

Copper, which is used in everything from electrical wires to grid infrastructure to data centres, is expected be in high demand as the energy transition gathers pace. This has driven a strategic shift across the mining industry, including BHP’s £39bn bid for Anglo American last year. Price spent 14 years at BHP before he joined Teck, ultimately as its chief transformation officer.

“There are major tailwinds here for demand for new copper, coupled with an environment where there aren’t that many copper projects that are at an advanced stage,” says Price. “Demand is running well ahead of supply.”

Many analysts and bankers expect Teck’s copper assets, highly prized by the rest of the industry, will continue to make the company a takeover target.

But if Teck does ever do a deal, it will be able to choose its partner. The furore in Canada over Glencore’s takeover attempt was so great that the government rewrote takeover guidelines to prevent hostile deals in the resources sector. Any future acquisitions of Canadian mining companies will only be approved “under the most exceptional circumstances”, the government announced last year.

Price will not be drawn on any future deals but he does think the mining industry is going through a consolidation period. During the last M&A boom during the mid-2000s, he was working in investment banking at ABN Amro. He says this period feels similar, like “we are going to see more activity from an M&A perspective”.

Memories from working in finance inform his approach to work. He describes moving from nickel refinery to investment banking as “the biggest culture shock of my life”. The refinery, he says, stuck to a “focused and disciplined” daily schedule. “You arrive at 6:30 in the morning [then] go forth and execute. At 4pm or 5pm, the whistle blows and the day’s work is over.” In banking, Price was often the only person in the office at 9am, and would “spend most of the morning drinking coffee and getting ready to go out for lunch,” before working until 2am to finish a pitch deck. “I just thought to myself, this is crazy.”

Price is concerned about the impact the Trump administration could have. The US president has said he will impose a 25 per cent tariff on all goods entering the US from Canada and Mexico. “Tariffs and trade barriers are not helpful for commodity trade flows,” says Price.

Bankers expect resource nationalism to make big international mining deals harder to get over the line, as countries increasingly focus on securing their own access to scarce resources such as copper and cobalt needed in the energy transition. 

Teck’s operations are spread across US and Canadian borders: it mines zinc at Alaska’s Red Dog mine, refines ore at its Trail smelter in Canada, then sells final products — including zinc, lead, and germanium, an essential metal for defence — to customers in the US and globally.

Along with free trade, Price hopes to see permitting reform that can speed up the pace at which countries can tap into their domestic resources. “There’s a risk to the energy transition if we don’t mine more copper more quickly. We need it to support the energy transition,” he says. “And in the absence of that, we won’t be able to deliver the energy transition at the pace the world is counting on us to deliver.”