Meet the lithium high-climber taking on the short sellers...

Meet the lithium high-climber taking on the short sellers

Pilbara Minerals CEO Dale Henderson thrives on a challenge and hard work, and is willing to tackle everything from Chinese lithium buyers to Himalayan mountains.

Brad Thompson

Pilbara Minerals chief Dale Henderson is a competitive beast. Trevor Collensnormal
He’s living through his second lithium winter and says both he and the company are better prepared this time. We meet late on a Friday afternoon at the Phat Brew Club near his office. Four days earlier, Henderson was running long before sunrise in Perth to let off steam before the release of the Pilbara Minerals full-year results.
Henderson left a prominent headhunter shaking their head after turning down a plum executive role with one of the world’s biggest gold miners to join Pilbara Minerals in 2017.
He had just quit a senior role with the iron ore miner Fortescue. Pilbara Minerals stock was worth 30¢, the company had a rundown office in West Perth, a Nordic bond and big plans to build the Pilgangoora lithium mine.
“I had an offer from a major miner and much more stable company for a senior role through a very well-respected, high-cost headhunter. I went for the junior because it was a challenge,” he recalls.
“Often big challenges are a bit messy, and I’m reasonably comfortable with it. I know that sounds crazy.
“In contrast, there’s a very steady situation where you’re just monitoring the vital signs. That’s not me. To put it bluntly, that’s the kind of choice you can end up having. There are very successful, stable resources companies, and you can have a very successful career monitoring the vital signs and doing the next incremental approval.

Pilbara Minerals runs WA's Pilgangoora mine, one of the largest hard-rock lithium-tantalum deposits in the world. normal
“I was more driven by the excitement of ‘gee, look at that, we’ve got to get that built, we’ve got to get it running, or we’ve got to survive’.”
The kid from Timaru, NZ

The short sellers targeting Pilbara minerals probably have no idea what they are up against in Henderson.
Behind the neat suit and conservative commentary in his public-facing duties as leader of the most heavily shorted stock on the ASX, there is a highly competitive, battle-hardened fighter.
A child workaholic, teenage scholarship winner and then brilliant engineer who’s always “loved building things”, he’s a survivor of multiple commodity downturns on top of being a mountaineer and ultra-marathon runner in the days when he had more spare time.
Henderson sold vegetables from his backyard as a child growing up in the rugby obsessed town of Timaru on New Zealand’s South Island. He delivered newspapers, mowed lawns, did whatever he could to make a dollar and always dreamed of going to university.
He made it, thanks to a scholarship from what was then known as the Graeme Bringans Property Education Trust (now called Keystone Trust), and the selection process opened his eyes to what was possible.
“It was quite a daunting exercise at the time, lots of panel interviews and being flown to Auckland. I was successful, much to my surprise, and it was a big deal. It gave me a big boost and to get that sort of endorsement was a good confidence boost,” he says.

Dale Henderson mountain climbing in New Zealand. normal
Armed with a degree in civil engineering and a bit of experience at a state-owned coal mine, he left New Zealand in his early 20s and never looked back professionally.
First stop was WA and the iron ore industry, but his burning desire was to work on big oil and gas projects in the Middle East.
A three-month trial working with New York-listed Occidental Petroleum in Oman turned into a multi-year stint embedded in a large-scale project that faced many challenges.
“It was a fantastic period and a formative time for me. What my career has been all about is just resource projects and developing them and bringing them into operation. That was my first proper experience where I was absolutely in the thick of it and learned lots and really threw myself into it,” he says.
“I grew with it as it grew. I just got thrown more and more challenges because I was successful in getting the works delivered. It was a big job, there was lots of pressure. So that three months turned into quite a few years, and I navigated up the chain.”
Road to Perth

The global financial crisis threw a spanner in the works, and he helped deliver some of the big cuts in oil. The relative calm of the post-GFC period allowed Henderson to finally take a break when he travelled through South America and deep into the Amazon, and then to the Himalayas.
The plan was to return to Oman but, frustrated by visa delays, he eventually ended up in Perth with three job offers on the table, including one in the Middle East.
He took a role with Worley Parsons because it was winning a lot of work for the likes of Chevron and Woodside in WA’s offshore oil and gas industry.
But first Worley Parsons wanted Henderson to help Fortescue with its iron ore shipping infrastructure at Port Hedland.
“I said look, I’m a hydrocarbons guy – that was the way I thought about myself – and I’d like you to put me on these big hydrocarbons projects,” he says.
He agreed to help Fortescue for a few months. That turned into a couple of years, and he eventually joined Fortescue, where he became the equivalent of a general manager.
Henderson was part of a team that implemented a big cost-cutting package at the then debt-heavy Fortescue when the iron ore price crashed and 1000 workers were sacked in 2012.
He quit once Fortescue was in good health and made the fateful call to join Pilbara Minerals over the blue-chip gold miner. He was hired by then Pilbara Minerals boss Ken Brinsden to build Pilgangoora, and that’s what he did.
“In 2017, the sky was bright for lithium. And by early 2018 the sky was very bright. Pilbara’s share price rocketed to $1.20, and we thought how good is this? It started to go down from that point forward, and we went into the first lithium winter,” he says.
It got so bad that mining stopped unless there was an order to fill. Office workers rang a bell every time an order came through.
By 2022-23, the orders were so big and the prices so high, they needed a new office calculator to crunch the profit numbers. Pilbara Minerals made a net profit of $2.4 billion that year when the average price a tonne for spodumene concentrate from Pilgangoora was $US4447 and the company paid a maiden dividend.
Ultimately, pricing will turn, and the lithium market has got a way of surprising everyone.
— Dale Henderson, Pilbara Minerals CEO
Now the company is suffering through another lithium winter. Prices for the lithium ore typically produced by Pilbara and other Australian hard-rock mines fell to $US720 a tonne in the first week of September, according to S&P Global’s Platts.
Henderson, who took the reins as managing director and CEO in July 2022, is trusting his team to survive and thrive. When hiring, Henderson looks for leaders who inspire their teams to follow them through their integrity and character.
They must also be capable and confident in their role and have an X-factor or spark, he says.
His own leadership style has evolved based on observing his former bosses and what works well and what doesn’t.
Henderson is not losing sleep worrying about the short sellers as Pilbara Minerals doubles down on lithium by investing in a big boost in production.
“At the end of the day, they’ve got to buy their stock back. What I focus on is what we can control, which is navigating this market environment. I like to think we’re doing a pretty good job. Ultimately, pricing will turn, and the lithium market has got a way of surprising everyone,” he says.
Henderson says Pilbara Minerals is a company which fought its way into existence by not taking no for an answer. He’s proud of the way it took on powerful players in China and won their respect by pioneering lithium auctions to disrupt the market, and pushed ahead with a lithium hydroxide plant in South Korea when others got cold feet about moving downstream.
“My message to the team is, ‘Ok, we’re going pretty well, but what we want to do is put distance between us and the competition’. We want it to be an embarrassment. So what are we doing next?”