Sherritt International is a name that reliably surfaces whenever investors go hunting for nickel and cobalt exposure outside the big diversified miners. It is a Canadian resource company with a genuinely unusual footprint, most of it in Cuba and Madagascar, and it is a useful reminder of how different one nickel miner can be from another. Marc Lichtenfeld’s Oxford Income Letter promo points at a much larger mining company, so Sherritt is best understood on its own terms, not as a stand-in for the pick.
A Canadian Miner With an Unusual Map
Sherritt International is headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, and its shares trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange. What makes it distinctive is where its operations actually sit. Rather than the familiar mine sites of Canada or Australia, Sherritt’s nickel and cobalt production is anchored in Cuba, through the Moa joint venture, and it has held a stake in the Ambatovy project in Madagascar. The company also runs a meaningful energy business in Cuba, producing oil, gas, and electricity alongside its mining operations.
That geography is both Sherritt’s identity and its complication. Cuba carries sanctions and embargo-related complexity for any company doing business there, which restricts the pool of investors and lenders willing to get involved. Madagascar’s Ambatovy project, meanwhile, has a long history of cost overruns, construction delays, and production shortfalls. None of that makes Sherritt a bad company, but it does mean its risk profile looks nothing like a diversified global miner’s.
Nickel and Cobalt Are the Point
The investment case for Sherritt rests on two metals. Its Moa operation mines and processes laterite ore, the same class of nickel deposit that dominates production in Indonesia and the Philippines. Laterite nickel is abundant in the earth’s crust but expensive to process, which is why cobalt, a byproduct recovered at Moa, matters so much to the economics. Cobalt is a key input in many lithium-ion battery cathodes, so Sherritt effectively carries exposure to two battery metals from a single ore body.
That is the appeal: a relatively pure nickel and cobalt producer at a moment when electric-vehicle demand keeps climbing. The tradeoff is that laterite processing is capital intensive, and Sherritt’s costs have historically run high compared with the sulfide nickel mines of Russia or Canada. When nickel prices are strong, that margin gap is tolerable. When prices fall, it is not, and the stock reflects that volatility.
Why It Is Not the Promo Pick
It is worth being precise here. The Oxford Income Letter promo about the biggest threat SpaceX ever faced does not point at Sherritt. The nickel miner in that pitch is Vale, a Brazilian giant with iron ore and nickel operations, and the SpaceX hook itself belongs to a liquid oxygen supplier rather than any nickel company. We profile Vale in our Vale stock explainer.
Sherritt is a different kind of animal. Vale is a diversified blue chip with a roughly $50 billion market capitalization and a Chinese steel demand engine behind it. Sherritt is far smaller, far more concentrated in nickel and cobalt, and far more sensitive to the price of those two metals. Investors sometimes blur these names together because both are nickel miners, but they sit on opposite ends of the risk spectrum. For the fuller set of established nickel producers, see our nickel companies piece.
What Investors Should Watch
Two forces decide Sherritt’s fate more than anything else. The first is the price of nickel, which has been under pressure for years from a wave of new Indonesian supply even as electric-vehicle demand climbs. The second is the price of cobalt, which has swung sharply as battery makers shift chemistries toward designs that use less of it. On top of both sits the operational reality of Cuba and the lingering cleanup around Ambatovy.
For readers who want the full story behind the promo itself, our SpaceX biggest threat teardown connects the liquid oxygen hook to the actual companies involved. The short version: Sherritt is a legitimate, if volatile, way to own nickel and cobalt, but it is not the company the ad is selling.
A Simple Way to Think About Sherritt
The short version is that Sherritt is a concentrated nickel and cobalt bet with a complicated footprint. It gives investors something the diversified majors do not: direct sensitivity to two battery metals at once. That sensitivity is precisely what makes it volatile, and it is why the company behaves more like a trading position than a core holding for most portfolios.
If the nickel price recovers and the company keeps its operations on track, Sherritt has real upside. If Indonesian supply keeps prices low, the same concentration works against it. Treat it as a high-risk, high-sensitivity name, not as a substitute for the diversified miner the Oxford Income Letter actually recommends.
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