Daniel Sullivan is the head of global natural resources and a portfolio manager at Janus Henderson Investors.
Speaking at the Livewire LIVE 2026 conference in Sydney this week, he delivered one key message: the good times for commodities have returned, and he expects them to last for some time.
Sullivan speaks from 40 years of experience in the sector and believes the next decade will be “phenomenally positive”.
He points to three major forces behind this view: deglobalisation, decarbonisation, and defence.
Part of the impetus, in his analysis, is that the West has conceded too much to China’s industrial strategy. Sullivan argues this situation cannot continue and says it will not.
He notes that while investors may have mentally moved on from decarbonisation, it is still happening in a big way in the real world.
“Solar is massive, and it’s so cheap,” he tells the audience. This, he explains, means “more and more batteries” while electric vehicles (EVs) are “booming”.
Sullivan is not shy about making a bold call or two. He forecasts that most people will be driving Chinese EVs within five to 10 years, with traditional automakers left producing only a “few niche things”, “but not many”.
Lithium boom will be “absolutely huge”
According to Sullivan, lithium is now in its third boom, and he expects it to be “absolutely huge”.
He also highlights what he sees as the defining bottleneck of the current era: critical minerals.
He draws a comparison with the Chinese boom that lifted resource equities for, at one point, seven consecutive years.
That same cycle transformed Fortescue (ASX:FMG) from a tiny resource junior into one of the most profitable stocks in ASX history. Fortescue was far from alone, with the sector producing many ‘10-baggers’ during that period.
Sullivan and his team believe investors now face a similar cyclical opportunity.
The key equation, he explains, is that demand is extremely strong, while supply simply cannot respond quickly enough. As a result, an enormous amount of work will be needed to meet it.
Sullivan identifies copper, lithium, and rare earths as the most important commodities, as they are key inputs to all three of his major themes and are very difficult to substitute.
Lithium alone, he says, still has room to grow its market size eightfold.
Reflecting on his own career, which began in coal, Sullivan notes that many of those companies no longer exist.
Lithium, by contrast, is a relatively new sector, with most companies in the industry not existing a decade ago.
It’s an era for hard assets to thrive.
Write to Callum Newman at Mining.com.au
Main image: Unsplash
