Simon Moores is founder and executive chair of the UK-based Benchmark Mineral Intelligence which claims to be the world’s leading Price Reporting Agency (PRA) for the lithium ion battery, electric vehicle and energy transition supply chains. He launched Benchmark in 2014 after eight years at the company successively known as Metal Bulletin, Euromoney and Fastmarkets. He had joined as an assistant editor on Industrial Minerals after graduating in geology, and helped to establish its lithium, graphite and lithium ion battery coverage. Benchmark, which increased its revenue by 27% in 2023, generates most of its revenue from subscriptions.
Benchmark has quickly grown to be a top source of information for miners, battery makers and politicians. Moores has several times addressed the US Senate on electrification and given university lectures at Stanford and Oxford.
Last year, Spectrum private equity acquired a 20% stake in Benchmark in a deal which was said to value the company at almost $500mn. It also acquired Rho Motion, an energy transition data and market intelligence provider which is claimed to have made Benchmark “the world’s biggest platform for prices, data and market intelligence dedicated to the full breadth of critical mineral and energy transition supply chains”.
| SnapShot Benchmark Mineral Intelligence | ||
| £mn | 2023 | 2022 |
| Revenue | 16.4 | 12.9 |
| Subscriptions | 9.8 | 7.3 |
| Events | 3.7 | 3.2 |
| Consultancy | 2.9 | 2.5 |
| UK | 2.2 | 1.6 |
| RoW | 14.2 | 11.3 |
| EBITDA | 0.8 | 3.4 |
| People | 89 | 35 |
What were your earliest ambitions?
To build myself a career, make an impact on whatever I was doing and to travel the world. I took that into Benchmark. I never had grand ambitions to build something the size of, and as important as, Benchmark: To create lithium prices that settle huge contracts or data that enables the construction of multi billion-dollar gigafactories. I neither had goals to speak at the US Senate or be briefing The White House and UK government departments over the years. But these amazing things can happen if you get your head down and work, enjoy what you are doing and celebrate moments along the way. Those perceived smaller moments can add up to really big things. Yet ego and impatience doesn’t allow most people to build something important.
Ultimately, we created Benchmark from a principle of expecting very little and working for everything. And from knowing there was no option to fail. We built Benchmark from a position of ‘everything or nothing’.
What were your first jobs?
Newspaper delivery at 11, McDonald’s at 16. My parents taught me a simple lesson: if you want to buy something, you have to earn money and then you can spend it on whatever you want. So, I got to work. I learned at age 11 that work equals money which equals financial freedom and freedom of choices. My career step – after graduating from the University of Birmingham, in the UK – was at Industrial Minerals magazine, the niche minerals part of Metal Bulletin when it was an independent company on the London Stock Exchange. I was there just as Euromoney acquired Metal Bulletin in 2006 and I saw all the changes from the inside.
An entire layer of the company was removed within 12 months, research analysts were fast-tracked into senior management positions, and change was everywhere. The commercial nature of the company allowed me to really excel on side-projects in minerals, to earn more money and dig into subjects on which a magazine feature only scratched the surface. I had become interested in depth, detail and data. I was learning fast.
What were your milestones at Fastmarkets?
Launching the company’s modern-day coverage of lithium and critical minerals like graphite and rare earths was a breakthrough. For me, the big moment was breaking the news story that China had blocked rare earths exports to Japan. Less than a day later, it ended up on the front page of The New York Times – a moment that ushered in the critical minerals era back in 2010. But that’s a common theme with legacy media companies of not allowing the opportunity within to develop. But I guess that, if it were perfect, no one would ever create new businesses.
What prompted you to launch Benchmark?
It was clear there was a need for true industry-first price collection for lithium. It simply didn’t exist. Any prices available then were simply a by-product of a journalistic operation, driven by breaking news. As Metal Bulletin evolved, the line between content and commercial became blurred, particularly where big money was available, such as in the Middle East and Russia.
But Industrial Minerals was mostly left alone. I felt there was a need for an approach to specialist lithium that was ‘data first’. I considered that lithium and rare earths were a forgotten part of the Euromoney empire. It was liked by the management but was not ever going to be a big revenue driver for them: the bigger money, at the time, was in steel and ferro alloys.
Ultimately, I felt there was no choice for me but to establish Benchmark. I only had £10,000 to launch the business, the money I had made from selling my Euromoney shares. I was grateful to Euromoney for more than that because the company gave me the chance to learn all the things that make a publishing business successful. I’m very proud to have become one of the most successful companies with its roots in Euromoney.
How do you describe your company?
Benchmark is the world’s leading price reporting agency (PRA) and data provider for the energy storage revolution – central to the energy transition. We are a business built on a ‘prices and data first ‘approach and have that specialist focus, beginning with the lithium ion battery supply chain, from mine to gigafactory. Lithium is at our core. But Critical Minerals – nickel, cobalt, graphite, rare earths, and manganese – are also significant revenue drivers for us. Battery cells, midstream chemicals like cathodes and anodes, and battery recycling and its output, black mass, are a bedrock business for us. And copper is our future. We have just launched a world class division that has been three years in the making.
All of these product streams interconnect and cross-over. We are a pureplay for the energy transition with a unique supply chain approach, from mine to grid. While most legacy media companies have rebranded parts of their business to fit into this energy transition thematic, the reality is that a lot of revenue is tied to industrial applications.
Benchmark is a pureplay for the critical minerals and new energy era. Subscriptions are 80% of our revenue. The compounding nature of subscriptions has remained central to our business model since 2014. Very high renewal rates have driven our growth because customers rely on our lithium and critical mineral prices to settle contracts.
Our unrivalled depth of supply chain data is embedded in industry and financing workflows and as governments create policy based on our data and advice. People need data they can trust. They need guidance from expert knowledge. They need a brand they can rely on. It’s a combination of these things that make it all work well for us. The remainder of our revenue is from strategic consulting – really big impact projects for the supply chain – and events, which have also become an important industry and geopolitical platform for us, especially in the US and Europe.
We took the hard route by creating an entire platform but, wow, is it really paying off now!
What makes you proudest of your company?
The brand: the fact we are the benchmark for our space globally. It’s one thing being a PRA and a publishing company, it’s another entirely to become the most influential company in industry and government worldwide. This is especially true for the US government over many administrations. I am proud of our aggressive but honest and fair approach to business. I am also proud of how we have out-thought, out-paced, and out-invested our competitors from a standing start (with no money) over the course of a decade.
In the 1910s, you had Metal Bulletin driven by steel, in the 1920s you had Platts and Wood Mackenzie on the back of the oil boom, CRU in 1969 with copper, and Argus Media with gas around the same time. In the 2020s, you have Benchmark – we are here to win and to outlast all others.
More than anything else, I’m most thankful for the fact we had the people, the confidence and conviction to take this opportunity.
Which PRAs inspired you?
I was inspired by what Platts did in the 1970s with oil. I read up on my history of how this was done and did the same for lithium, graphite and critical minerals. But I don’t really like the term ‘PRA’. It’s a marketing term that was created in the late 2010s to make publishers’ pricing subscriptions seem more technical and impressive than they actually were.
The International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) principles were created to atone for the sins of legacy media commodity publishers. People have to remember that the offices of these PRAs were raided by authorities as part of a European Commission investigation. While the IOSCO framework doesn’t prevent the same things from happening again, it is a helpful tool to reduce the possibility.
For me, it’s doing the basics well that stops price manipulation in our market.
You need to have real knowledge of these markets, proper contacts to understand if you are being misled, and rock solid, deep methodologies that are mineral specific and lithium-first. You have to be careful that your business doesn’t just become a sales and marketing operation. Content is always king. The cost of a PRA audit is designed to keep small publishers out and to keep the unholy alliance between exchanges and Legacy Media tight. Yet Benchmark broke through that barrier and then raised it with our Type 2 IOSCO across the board on all we do.
Benchmark is slowly eroding and exposing the way things have previously been done in the world of exchanges and PRAs.
What have been the major achevements of this past 2-3 years?
Partnering with Spectrum Equity was a big moment for us. We spent four years trying to find the right partner that would be a true minority equity partner – particularly in terms of their nature, not just what the contract says. While many private equity firms talked a good game, most were not true minority investors. We knew we needed to bring in key leaders in sales, technology and finance to help drive our next phase of growth. And we did this in record time last year. 2025 and 2026 is when this really beds into what we are doing. The Spectrum deal, arguably, made Benchmark the most valuable pound-for-pound business in the PRA and commodity publishing world. If anyone doubted what we do and how we do it – mainly our competitors – those doubts evaporated in that moment.
What is your own primary role?
I am still involved on a day-to-day basis, guiding our strategic medium- and long- term direction. It gives me time to engage more with governments. I believe Benchmark got to where it was because we always had a long term trajectory – the feeling that this wasn’t just a flash in the pan. From Project Skyfall to our Everything or Nothing era, there is always a plan. Since Covid, we have expanded so quickly that I am enjoying bringing some of the longterm thinking back into the business. And I can only do that because we have Andy Miller, now as our CEO, who has been by my side since day one.
What is your ultimate ambition for Benchmark?
Benchmark is here to stay. The brand will outlast me and everyone in the business. It’s a generational moment. We are scaling quickly, our subscriptions are growing significantly, and thankfully people want to be here. They want to be a part of Team Benchmark. The acquisition of Rho Motion has proved this. One major competitor was chasing them for a long long time – trying everything to gain what had become a key acquisition target for us.
Which company do you most admire?
Robert Perlman, of CRU. He’s a true pioneer of our times, a creator and a builder. He has scaled CRU from scratch since 1969. To oversee its growth as a major pillar of the commodity space and, still, to be at the helm guiding the business, is quite incredible and very inspiring.
What are the best lessons you have learned?
- Let the battle commence.
- To not rely on anyone for anything.
- Hard work, focus, longevity wins the day if you truly believe in what you are doing.
- It’s clear who the corporate pretenders are and who the real change makers are. Trust and invest in those that actually do things and change things. Those with money must back those with ideas.
