TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – Juniors and exploration companies are heading into an era when their mineral discoveries will be more in demand than ever, investment strategist Don Coxe said on Wednesday.

In a speech on the final day of the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada's annual convention, he said that Chinese and Indian companies will become more active in securing earlier stage projects, to benefit from production down the line.

“Prospectors and developers may well find when they have outlined an orebody that they have got two sets of bidders for it – conventional mining companies that they know, and on the other hand, the Chinese and Indians.”

Industrial metals will be a crucial requirement in the expansion of the Chinese and Indian economies, Coxe said.

“Pressure is going to develop between established mining companies bidding for companies, and sovereign wealth funds, foreign exchange funds and so forth, who, if they are to keep their economic growth going, they must see that the resources are there.”

In a speech labelled 'Two bets for mining growth: the base metals bet on Asia and the precious metals bet on Obama', Coxe also said that gold will be supported by safe-haven investment demand, as governments go further into deficits.

A year earlier, the speaker at the same event was newsletter writer and notorious bear Marc Faber. He told the audience the best investments they could make were in gold and farmland, in preparation for a “dirty war”.