Robert Friedland, the mining billionaire who chairs Sunrise Energy Metals, says the Australian listed company may relocate its headquarters to the United States. It may become an American company, Friedland said in a Bloomberg Television interview, adding that Uncle Sam likes these companies to be domiciled in the United States.
The comments follow a 400 million dollar conditional loan commitment Sunrise secured from the US Department of Defense for its Syerston project, which is being developed to produce scandium, a metal used in aerospace alloys and specialized batteries but rarely mined in significant quantities outside China. The loan marks a direct bet by the Pentagon on securing a domestic supply chain for a metal it considers strategically important.
Friedland is also the founder of Ivanhoe Mines and has spent decades building companies around metals central to industrial and defense supply chains, from copper to platinum group metals. Sunrise Energy Metals, listed on the Australian Securities Exchange, has said it is exploring a listing on a US exchange in addition to weighing where the company itself should be domiciled.
A move to the United States would place Sunrise inside the same regulatory and investor environment as the Pentagon financing it just received, a step that could make it easier for the company to raise further capital from American investors already primed to back projects the US government has flagged as strategically significant. It would also shift Sunrise away from the Australian market where it has traded for years.
The Syerston project is one of a small number of scandium developments worldwide, and Sunrise's ability to secure Pentagon backing reflects how seriously Washington has begun treating supply chains for metals used in defense and aerospace applications. Friedland's comments suggest the company sees aligning itself more closely with the United States, structurally and not just contractually, as the logical next step.