65figured out ways to recycle rhenium,
causing the price to slump. It’s still
essential, but with an annual produc-
tion of about 50 tons in 2018, it’s too
niche for bigger trading companies.
Lipmann—whose mantra is “low in
volume, high in value”—remains a
fan, though.
Slight of build, he often wears
bookish glasses and has gray,
disheveled hair, giving him a look
more science teacher than adven-
turer. Yet speak to him for a few minutes, and he comes alive,
tales of his exploits tumbling out. “A metals trader can spend
his whole career without ever setting foot on a mine,” he says.
“But I’m not interested in that type of life.”
Because rare metal values can skyrocket overnight and col-
lapse just as fast with the advent of new technologies, neither
producer nor consumer tends to want more than necessary
on their balance sheets. Lipmann will assume this risk. Unlike
brokers who stick to matching buyers with sellers in exchange
for commission, he buys, transports, and stores his elements
unhedged, exposed to the vagaries of the market.
One time a customer reneged, and Lipmann wound up with
some 1.5 tons of rhenium parked in a warehouse. That caused
some sleepless nights until a random contact he’d made while
scouring junkyards in northern England informed him that
Rolls-Royce Holdings Plc needed rhenium for a new jet engine
design. Lipmann landed the contract in the mid-1990s and has
been stocking the stuff ever since. For him the story sums up
the life of a metals merchant: “The cost is being at total risk.
The privilege is that you have customers.”
Right now, Lipmann is excited about germanium, which is
used for fiber-optic cables as well as in the solar industry. The
market is tiny, but supplies have recently been constrained.
“I did 10 kilos of germanium scrap last night,” he says. “I was
doing it at 10 o’clock in the evening.”
His path to this life wasn’t straightforward. His father
founded the company he runs, but neither foresaw that he’d
become a metals trader, too. The younger Lipmann dreamed of
becoming a writer; armed with a degree from Oxford in English
literature, he got a job as a cub reporter at a provincial British
newspaper. His journalistic career burned fast and in no way
bright. “At the end of my first week, my editor said, ‘Anthony,
is there anything you prefer to do?’ ” Lipmann recalls.
He boarded a train to London for an interview and landed
a job with a small metals broker. These were unreformed days
for the London Metal Exchange, a world of rough East End
kids who indulged in boozy lunches and fistfights and who
hazed colleagues by leaving them bound in chairs on eleva-
tors. Despite his somewhat posh upbringing, Lipmann gained
acceptance by reeling in big clients, notably one who ordered
thousands of tons of aluminum a day. Yet he yearned to be
more hands-on. History provided an opportunity. The for-
mer Soviet Union was full of master metallurgists, and when
it unraveled, metal began to flow from East to West. Lipmann
reopened his father’s mothballed business, which handily car-
ried his name. As word got out, faxes came rolling in. Did he
have any use for some T-42 tanks? How about some MiG wings?Such military gear, some of it black market, carried its share
of pedestrian metal but also more interesting materials. He
speaks fondly of a special type of magnesium.
On visits to submarine bases, spaceports, and junkyards
across Russia and the rest of the former USSR, Lipmann
encountered sellers who were sometimes dangerous and often
desperate. “We had deals where I shouldn’t have done it,” he
says. Cash, usually dollars, was the preferred payment—say,
$100,000 in big notes—with helpful Estonian banks facilitat-
ing the transactions. “It really was cowboy land out there, but
he was able to take it and make a success of it,” says Douglas
Hunter, a metals trader at Wogen Resources Ltd. in London
who worked with Lipmann in the 1990s.
In Armenia, Lipmann was led on a long journey through
fields of tomatoes and cucumbers to arrive at a pigsty. He
feared it was a trick or a trap, but it wasn’t. Inside was a vodka
still, fashioned from titanium, that had once belonged to the
state. Lipmann laid hands on the apparatus, which his com-
panions took as a commitment to purchase. He went through
with it. “You bought it because you’d gone six hours and
tapped something,” he says.
Lipmann, who subscribes to the notion that “atoms have
no allegiances,” tries not to let politics interfere with business.
“If Iran offered me rhenium, I would buy it” for as long as it’s
allowable under European law, he says. That said, he has lim-
its: North Korea and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where
he says corruption is rife, are two countries he won’t deal with.
But of course he’s happy to benefit from politics when the
opportunity presents itself. The escalating global trade war is
a case in point—the more barriers are erected between coun-
tries, the more work there will be for middlemen like him.
“It’s going to be a delight,” he says with a grin.
And he retains a journalist’s curiosity about the world. In
Chile, his itinerary was a mix of homage to the past and peek at
the future. He asked his hosts to detour to Chuquicamata’s cem-
etery, where he walked between miners’ graves while jotting
down notes in a journal. Buried among the Chileans, Bolivians,
and Brazilians there was an Ernest Alexander Smart, born in
Durham, England, on Sept. 28, 1885—a reminder that Lipmann
wasn’t the first Briton to be lured to this mineral-rich desert.
The next stop was Codelco’s rhenium plant, a bright orange-
and-green building in the port district of Mejillones, a three-and-
a-half-hour drive from the mine. The process is an industrial
secret, but in somewhat simplified terms, the molybdenum-rich
material left from copper extraction is roasted to remove sul-
fur, with rhenium captured from the resulting gas. What you get
after a couple more steps are pellets. Lipmann was impressed,
proclaiming the facility “the NASA of rhenium” after his tour.
The entire process takes about two months, so even if
prices are low, the supply side of the market can be slow to
react, which means Lipmann sees good potential for it to
increase. Besides which, he says, metals go in and out of fash-
ion. Zirconium, a byproduct of the nuclear industry, was once
used mainly to harden copper alloys. Now it’s at the heart
of what he calls “the incredible new world” of amorphous
alloys, which are showing up in 5G-compatible mobile hand-
sets. Lipmann has some in stock that he bought 20years ago
on a hunch, or perhaps as a calculated bet. All he’ll say is he
liked it because it’s shiny. <BW>Rhenium pelletsBloomberg Businessweek / SEPTEMBER 2, 2019 THE ELEMENTS