DEAP Capital rebrands as CMFC Plc to focus on critical minerals finance

DEAP Capital Plc has rebranded as Critical Minerals Financing Corporation Plc (CMFC), as the investment firm pivots to financing Africa’s critical minerals industry amid intensifying global competition for energy-transition metals.

The renaming was made after shareholders approved the change at the 12th annual general meeting in Lagos on Thursday.

The repositioning follows the entry of Banklink Africa Private Equities Limited as core investor and a fresh capital injection of about N6 billion, which the company says will support its ambition to build mineral value chains across Nigeria and the wider continent.

Speaking about the development, Lamon Rutten, the chairman of the company, said Africa’s persistent gap between resource wealth and economic prosperity reflects a failure to capture value locally.

“There’s a gap because those resources are not being ‘valurised’,” Rutten said in an interview with BusinessDay.

“How do you extract value from resources? By financing that development. That’s exactly what this company is going to do.”

Nigeria and several African countries hold deposits of lithium, cobalt, tin and other minerals used in batteries, electric vehicles and renewable energy technologies.

The value of those precious metals are estimated at more than $700 billion in Africa’s most populous economy, and are largely untapped.

Yet much of the output is exported in raw form, with processing and most of the value addition occurring overseas.

“You have a lot of ore being exported without any processing, so most of the value added of your wealth actually leaves the country,” Rutten said.

He said CMFC intends to back integrated supply chains rather than focus solely on extraction, arguing that countries seeking to build modern manufacturing industries increasingly see critical minerals as foundational.

“In the past, the U.S. basically looked at critical mineral strategy as a storage strategy,” he said.

“Now they’re looking at how do we go upstream — how do we go to the mine? They look at it in a value chain way.”

Rutten noted that much of the capital financing African mining projects originates outside the continent.

“Currently, the competitors are doing this out of Africa — European, American, even Middle Eastern money,” he said.

“It’s actually a pretty good thing to have African money ‘valurising’ these African resources.”

Mining development remains capital-intensive and slow-moving, requiring geological surveys, environmental studies, regulatory approvals and complex logistics.

“If your geologists say there are resources in the ground, you need environmental permits and studies.”

“Logistics is a headache to get the products from the mine to the port or processing plant. Government policies are often out of date,” Rutten said. “It’s a slow process.”

DEAP Capital has struggled to recover fully from the 2008 financial crisis and continues to report negative shareholders’ funds.

However, the new board which included newly elected directors (Israel Ovirih, Tope Oduseso and Francis Ekeng) and N6 billion recapitalisation are expected to stabilise operations.

The company narrowed its loss to N9 million in the year ended September 2025 from N19.2 million a year earlier, buoyed by a surge in investment income.

Investors appear to be responding positively to the strategic shift. Shares of DEAP Capital have surged this year, closing at a record N7 on Thursday.

The stock has returned about 268 percent since January, ranking it third on the Nigerian Exchange in terms of year-to-date performance.

The company said its focus on critical minerals financing should begin to yield noticeable gains within 12 to 24 months as it deploys capital and advances projects along the mineral value chain.

“The potential is so large,” Rutten said. “Africa is a very wealthy continent in terms of resources. It’s a very poor continent in terms of actual money.”

Wasiu Alli

Wasiu Alli is a business, economics cum data journalist with strong expertise covering macro trends, capital markets, government policies, corporate earnings and comparative economics analysis. Alli turns raw data into trends that not only tells compelling stories but nudges investors to make valued and informed decisions. He’s an alumnus of Lagos State University and trained at Lagos Business School. He formerly heads the Companies and Markets desk at BusinessDay where he writes and supervises the production of well researched articles on earnings updates, corporate sectoral comparisons, market intelligence as well as interviews with C-suite executives.