Daily Brief Energy/Materials: Pan-United, BRC Asia, Alzchem Group, ELANTAS Beck India, NewHydrogen, ESGold , Daiichi Kigenso Kagaku Kogyo, Guangdong Rising Mineral-Rich Mountain Copper and more

• We think Pan-United (PanU) is a high-quality, cash-generative play on Singapore’s construction upcycle.

• As the country’s largest ready-mixed concrete supplier, it converts a steady domestic construction pipeline into volume growth, and it has re-rated on rising earnings, a net cash balance sheet and a growing dividend.

• PanU is no longer simply a low growth Singapore construction materials supplier.

• We think BRC Asia Limited (“BRC”) is a structural play on Singapore’s construction sector via its dominant position within the reinforcing steel sub-sector.
• Its highly automated prefabrication facilities deliver critical on-site manpower savings, and its large-scale delivery network creates high barriers to entry.
• Consequently, it generated a resilient net profit margin of 6.1% in FY2025.

• In this insight, we look at the potential ADDs/DELs for the DAX and MDAX indices ahead of the December 2026 index rebal event.
• Currently, we don’t expect any changes in the DAX or MDAX indices, but two MDAX names are close to the border for inclusion in the DAX.
• Only the Fast Entry/Exit rules apply for the December rebalance, so names face stricter requirements to trigger index changes than in March and September, when Regular Entry/Exit rules also apply.

• H1 CY26 revenue reached about Rs. 506 crore, helped by a 35% YoY Q2 surge. The board has also approved a Rs. 56 crore Ankleshwar expansion.
• Growth is broadening beyond legacy wire-enamel demand into high-voltage resins, tapes, electronics materials, CTC applications, e-mobility and BESS-related thermal-management chemistries.
• The business now has more visible reinvestment avenues, but a market value above Rs. 10,000 crore already discounts a material portion of future execution. 

• Technical Lock-In Drives High Moats: ELANTAS Beck India holds a dominant market position with upwards of 50% market share in primary insulation (wire enamels) and 33% in secondary insulation (varnishes). This is protected by rigorous, 12-to-24-month qualification cycles with global end-OEMs (Siemens, ABB, Bosch), creating high customer switching costs.
• Geographic Export Caps Limit Scale: As a 75%-owned subsidiary of Germany’s ALTANA AG, the Indian listed entity is structurally restricted by its parent to serve only the South Asian market. Exports are capped at approximately 2% of revenues to prevent channel conflict with sister subsidiaries globally.
• Supply Chain De-risking via Localization: Over the past decade, the company has systematically localized its raw material sourcing, reducing its import dependency from 50% to roughly 32% of raw materials consumed. This strategy protects operating margins from currency fluctuations and global logistics bottlenecks.

• Thermodynamic Superiority vs. Commercial Captivity: Thermochemical water splitting, such as NewHydrogen’s ThermoLoop®, bypasses the costly electricity-to-heat-to-electricity loop of conventional electrolysis, presenting a theoretical shortcut to sub-$2.00 per kilogram clean hydrogen. However, its economic viability is completely captive to the commercial scale-up of high-temperature small modular reactors (SMRs) which remain in early testing and are years away from industrial deployment.
• Capital Disconnect & Going-Concern Risks: There is a severe mismatch between NewHydrogen’s capital resources—evidenced by a net loss of $2.85 million and a cash balance of $1.44 million at the end of 2025, alongside a highly dilutive $3 million GHS Investments equity facility—and the estimated $15 million to $20 million minimum required to develop and operate an automated engineering test unit and subsequent pilot plant.
• Key-Person and Management Deficiencies: While the technical core of the company is anchored by CTO Dr. Eric McFarland and his laboratory at UC Santa Barbara, the operational leadership is led by a CEO with a background in biopharmaceutical sales. This creates significant execution risks as the company attempts to transition from academic laboratory validation into complex, high-temperature chemical engineering.

• ELANTAS Beck India Limited (EBECK IN) is the market leader in India’s electrical insulation materials and engineering resins sector, controlling a dominant market share in wire enamels and impregnating resins backed by the proprietary R&D and global formulation expertise of its parent entity, ALTANA Group.
• Financial performance has inflected sharply, highlighted by an outstanding H1 CY26 revenue expansion (+46% YoY) and EBITDA margins expanding to 28.8% in Q2 CY26, driven by high-voltage resin localization, synergy realization from the Von Roll India asset acquisition, and rising penetration in e-mobility and Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS).
• While long-term secular tailwinds from domestic power grid modernization, industrial electrification, and EV adoption remain robust, the current valuation (~INR 10,900+ Cr market capitalization) prices in aggressive multi-year earnings execution, leaving narrow margin of safety against potential greenfield execution delays at the Bharuch project.

This content is AI-generated and displayed for general informational purposes only. Please verify independently before use.

• What you need to know: • ESGold has completed ~2,030m of its 5,000m drill program and has consistently observed sulphide-bearing intervals.
• • ~400 core samples are pending assays to determine the grade of the promising core samples.
• • In addition, an expanded ANT survey and updated 3D model has outlined property-wide opportunities, and commissioning continues to progress.

• On August 25, 2026, Daiichi Kigenso Kagaku Kogyo Co., Ltd. (hereafter, the Company), the leading manufacturer of zirconium (chemical symbol: Zr; atomic number 40) compounds, announced in a press release that it had established domestic manufacturing technology for hafnium (chemical symbol: Hf; atomic number 72), one of the critical rare metals.
• The Company plans to begin supplying samples by the end of 2026 and aims to start mass production in 2028.
• Following basic research conducted with the technical cooperation of its joint research partner Emulsion Flow Technologies Ltd., the Company has established domestic technologies for hafnium production and sample prototyping.

• Unprecedented tight copper concentrate supply has driven 2026 annual benchmark TC/RCs to $0/t and spot rates deeply negative (reaching -$132/t to -$173/t in mid-2026), shifting immense margin from smelters to miners. Consequently, Guangdong Rising Mineral-Rich Mountain Copper (Dabaoshan) achieved a copper concentrate gross margin of 65.3% in H1 2026.
• The company’s profitability is heavily double-leveraged to both copper and sulfur. Its sulfur concentrate gross margin climbed to 74.6% in H1 2026 due to a global sulfur supply crunch driven by Middle East geopolitical tensions and explosive domestic demand from the lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery value chain.
• Dabaoshan remains a highly vulnerable single-mine operation with a remaining mine life of only 13 years. Reinvestment and external M&A are severely constrained by the Guangdong State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC), which prioritizes production volumes and stable dividend payouts over return on invested capital (ROIC) maximization.