What are the economic implications of deep-sea mining?
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And this is Andrew Peach with World Business Report. Good to have your company. Today, the US wants more deep sea mining for minerals needed to make batteries, computer chips and weapons. There are reports that Apple's planning to move the production of its iPhone sold in the US from China to India in response to President Trump's tariffs. And we'll hear from the new boss of the Japanese convenience store chain, 7-Eleven. Lowering prices and lowering quality typically doesn't work.

because customers figure that out really fast. So what you have to do is find ways to maintain the quality while bringing your costs down as much as you can. First, President Trump has signed an executive order aimed at accelerating deep-sea mining for critical minerals for batteries, computer chips and weapons.

The Trump administration said the move could boost the US economy by $300 billion over 10 years. Critics say it could damage undersea ecosystems and threaten little-known species living thousands of metres below the surface of the ocean. My colleague Lexi O'Connor has been looking at critical minerals.

I didn't really realise the extent to which these minerals, they're kind of in everything. So you and I would really struggle to function in the modern world without them. They're in the PC that you're undoubtedly staring at right now. They're in the batteries that power our laptops, our phones. They're in medical equipment, dental equipment. They're in defence. They're in everything from bullets to aircraft.

They're in our electronics. They're in our power grids. But the big issue is we're going to need a lot more of them because a lot of these metals are key to the green transition. So things like cobalt, lithium, nickel, they are all in the batteries which power electric cars. They're also in wind turbines. They're also in solar panels. So all this green tech that many governments are hoping that will help them to reach their net zero targets –

It's crucial to that. We managed to make ourselves reliable on a whole new set of non-renewables, in other words. Give us a bit more on the executive order that Donald Trump has signed on this. So yesterday he signed an executive order. And the idea of that is that it will speed up permits for deep sea mining to extract these minerals from the ocean floor.

I can't really overstate how controversial this is. For more than a decade now, there's this organization called the International Seabed Authority. And it's been holding meetings with most of all of the countries in the world to try and thrash out a set of rules that would govern deep sea mining. And that's happened under a treaty called the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea that covers international waters, but...

The United States hasn't signed that treaty. So what Donald Trump wants to do is to use a 1980s law, which the United States says would allow mining not only in its own waters off its own coastline, but would also allow mining in these international waters. You talked about the need to find new sources of

of these critical minerals, but there's all sorts of controversy about finding them at the bottom of the ocean. Yeah, we're talking about things called polymetallic nodules. So they look like kind of metal potatoes. They lie on the seafloor, kilometres down. And the area we're talking about is called the Clarion-Clipperton zone. It's bang in the middle of the Pacific. It's between Hawaii and Mexico.

And the people who are for this say all mining is environmentally damaging. Mines on land, they have a huge footprint. They damage the land around it. They produce tons of waste. Often that waste is toxic.

You can also talk about places like the Democratic Republic of Congo, where most of our cobalt comes from. There's huge concerns about human rights there, about child labor. So the companies that want to explore the seabed say, well, you know, we're not doing any of that. That's fine. The environmentalists say they're incredibly concerned about it. They say we don't know enough about what life is down there, how it will affect people.

The creatures that live there, they say these nodules are millions of years old. They're concerned too about pollution and waste from these operations. The sea is the planet's biggest carbon sink. There's concerns that mining operations would impact on that. So there is a concern that not only would we be damaging our environment on Earth, on land, but

But alongside that, to meet our growing demand, we would be damaging what's under the sea.

It's Lexi O'Connor reporting. The metals company has long been pushing for permission to mine. Its shares went up 40% when news of the executive order broke. Gerard Barron is its chairman and CEO with us live on World Business Report. Gerard, thank you for your company. Is that what you want to do? You want to get cobalt, lithium, nickel, these things that have so many applications these days from the seabed? Well, I think as your informed journalist said,

The world depends on these critical minerals. And there's a saying, if it's not grown, it's mined. And we have to face a reality. And the reality is that if we want to continue meeting the needs, the metal needs of an industrializing world where people want to have better standards of living for the poor, and we also want to transition away from...

hydrocarbons, we're going to need billions of tons of these important metals. And I just ask you to go back to, you know, first principle thinking. And that is we should be carrying out extractive industries in parts of our planet,

that where there is the least life and not the most life. And the abyssal plain and hills cover about half of our planet. So it's the most common environment on Earth. I hear that. There's a reason the International Seabed Authority don't allow it, though, isn't it? They've looked into it. They've done experiments going back as far as the 1970s, which show that there is damage done to the environment by this.

No, that's not the case. The International Seabed Authority were established in 1994 to put in place regulations to allow exploration and exploitation. What's happened was that the exploration regs were adopted in 2001 and our own company were granted two exploration licenses in 2011 and then again in 2012, sponsored by developing countries Nauru and Tonga.

We have spent more money on ocean research than all of the other 17 license holders. And they include China and Japan, Korea, the United Kingdom. And so the responsibility of the ISA was to put in place

regulations to allow this commercial activity. But what's happened recently is environmental activists have started to play a heavy role and they've started to slow down the process, to add language into the regulations that make it almost impossible to operate. And so what happened were a number of countries, in fact, now 169 signed a treaty agreeing to do something

and have just not done it. But are you saying there are no species, no seabed animals whose environment would be harmed by this mining? That seems impossible. Of course it is impossible. Every activity we do has an impact. What we have to look at, going back to first principles, what will the impact be?

And how does it compare to the known set of impacts from land-based mining? And of course, on land, we're pushing into our most fragile ecosystems, our tropical rainforests where people live, people depend on those ecosystems. It has a lot of knock-on impacts into other areas.

And so what we've been focused at the metals company is to carry out the most extensive ocean research program ever. And so the notion that we don't know enough is absolute nonsense. But what you know is it will be damaging. You're just saying it wouldn't be as damaging as doing something else. No, but it's about damaging and it's about recovery. Like the notion that we can do something without having any impact is la la land. It doesn't work that way.

We have to be realistic. It's about trade-offs. Just wait on the line if you'd be so kind. Let me bring on Duncan Currie from the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition. What do you make of what you've heard from Gerard Barron from the metals company, Duncan? Well, it's more of the same, frankly. And what this would do, this executive order would do, would be to create a massive breach of international law

For years, as Mr Barron has said, the metals company and its sponsoring state, Nauru, have tried to persuade the International Seabed Authority that they can carry out this mining activity, and they failed to do so. And there's, without doubt, there's wide acceptance that there's insufficient information to carry out deep-sea mining, plus we know there will be damage. But the crucial point is that the massive uncertainties that there are there, and there was a recent report

study for example showing that that oxygen is created in the in the deep depths of the ocean which we didn't even have have any idea it could happen and metals company response to that has been to to to try to deny it and try to produce science that so give me a bit more just step away from the regulations for a second give me a bit more on what your top concerns are if this goes ahead you think that oxygen might be being generated on the seabed that's one give me others

Well, firstly, this would be unregulated mining. This is the crucial thing to understand. It plays 5,000 metres deep.

far away from any regulation, far away from any supervision. The metals company wants to carry out mining in the absence of regulation, either by the International Seabed Authority or realistically by anyone. That's the first problem. We know there will be damage. We know even removal of the nodules will damage the species that are dependent on those nodules for life. We know that the metals company proposes to bring sediment up

to the surface ship and then the sediment that it doesn't want will then be discharged about 2,000 metres into the middle of the ocean in an area causing a massive sediment plume that will be 365 days a year and

in an area that we know very little about. Let me put those two points to you, Gerard. The idea that sediment is then released back into the ocean causing further damage and also that there's a lot of unknown, including whether oxygen that we rely on is being generated on the seabed in ways we didn't understand. Well, let me start with the third point that Mr. Currie raised, and that was unregulated mining.

That is absolute nonsense. The best way to protect any environment is to regulate it. And the International Seabed Authority had the opportunity to do that.

The United States have a very thorough set of regulations that were put in place in 1980 that involved extensive public consultation. And those regulations are there to protect the marine environment. And so it will not be unregulated. On the topic of sediment, one of the things we have done in the last decade is spent hundreds of millions of dollars. And environmental activists, extremists,

speculated that the sediment could travel for thousands of miles. Yet our own research and research of other contractors as published in peer-reviewed papers from MIT and many others, show that the sediment at the benthic level

stays very localized, only rises two to three meters above the seafloor. Up to 98% of it settles in the same impact area. It creates its own turbidity current down there. It's an amazing phenomenon. And in the

the pelagic area, the sediment moves to background level. And so you very, very quickly within hundreds of meters. And so we have carried out that research and we have said we must rely on the data. It's independent scientific data that we must rely on. And on the third point of oxygen,

Well, we did fund that study and there have been many rebuttals to draw that in question, but that's the purpose of research. And so it's an anomaly, I will say. The scale of it is... Could be a pretty damaging anomaly, couldn't it? Not at all. No, we're not talking... Well, firstly...

The paper itself was heavily scrutinized and there were many flaws cited in it. And, you know, you just need to go and look at that. That's always going to be the case. Are you saying it's oxygen we don't need?

I'm saying that we don't think it is oxygen at all. We think it's an anomaly that was created through error. But let's just pretend for one moment that it is. The scale of it is so microscopic, it has no impact on the balance of oxygen on our planet. Back to Duncan Curry from Deep Sea Conservation for a second or two. This aligns very much with Donald Trump's drill, baby drill ideology. It's going to happen, isn't it?

It was a lot more complex, I think, than was made out. The trouble is you're dealing with processes 5,000 metres deep, far deeper than the Titanic. You're dealing with extreme pressure down there, and even things will go wrong. You can be sure of that. I do want to pick up on something that Mr Barron said. To be fair, I suppose, Duncan, you know,

But Gerard makes a good point to say, if we're going to supply the demands the world is making for this kind of material, it has to come from somewhere. And this is a potential source that we shouldn't just write off.

The first point to that is that the deep sea mining would continue alongside terrestrial mining. It's absolutely false to say that, or to imply that in some way you'd be shutting down terrestrial mines if deep sea mining started. The kind of volumes you're talking about are nowhere near the volumes that are being created at the moment. The second point is that these days of extractivism, of starting a whole new damaging industry,

are gone and there's a climate change and biodiversity loss. What we need to be doing is engaging in a transformation economy with circular economy and making sensible choices. For example, the metals company for years has argued that these metals are needed for vehicle batteries. In fact, nowadays,

an increasing amount, over 60% of Chinese electric vehicles don't even use nickel or cobalt in their batteries. They use lithium ion phosphate techniques, a whole different technique. I have to draw to a close there. I've learned so much about this today and by talking to both of you, it's a subject I think we're going to hear a lot more about in the coming weeks and months, deep sea mining. My grateful thanks to Gerard Barron, Chairman and CEO of the Metals Company and Duncan Currie from Deep Sea Conservation. Music

When you have bars in the sky, onboard showers and award-winning in-flight entertainment, it's no surprise that Emirates was recently named the best airline in the world. We fly you to over 140 destinations, and with partners across the globe, we connect you to another 1,700 cities across six continents. So when we say we're also the largest international airline, what we really mean is...

If you're going there, so are we. Book now on Emirates.com. Fly Emirates. Fly better. This advertisement feature is paid and presented by Standard Bank Corporate and Investment Banking. The African economy is booming. Across energy, infrastructure and urbanization, the continent is thriving. And private and public partnerships are crucial to unlocking continued growth for the economic and social benefit of many.

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This is World Business Report with Andrew Peach here on the BBC World Service. We're going to go to Japan now, where the world's largest convenience store chain, 7-Eleven, has been making news as it faces a buyout offer from a Canadian rival. Its parent company has appointed a new CEO, Stephen Dacus, the first non-Japanese national to hold the job. He's been talking to journalists today, among them my colleague Marika Oi. Hello.

Well, Andrew, he actually started the group interview by saying that he can't talk much about the buyout offer from its Canadian rival. He said it's still under consideration, so he can't and he doesn't really want to speculate on that matter. So I guess...

For us journalists, the next big question that we had to ask him was about the impact of those U.S. tariffs on the company's performance. Because as economists have been warning about it and as we've been reporting about it, these tariffs could push up prices in the United States worldwide.

which could make consumers maybe more reluctant to buy things, but also it could really increase costs for companies like 7-Eleven. Now, Mr. Dacus said that things are changing so much that he can't really predict what the exact impact is. But he told us how he plans to navigate increasing costs if it comes to that.

We don't know what those tariffs are going to be. We've seen some news recently where they've changed quite a bit. So it's a little bit difficult to understand what the ultimate effect is. However, I think a lot of people are assuming that that's going to have an impact on customers' consumption, on consumption patterns. And I think that's probably a good assumption. Lowering prices and lowering quality typically doesn't work.

Because customers figure that out really fast. You know, I mean, you've heard the term shrinkflation, right? Customers hate that. So what you have to do is find ways to maintain, and this makes it very difficult, find ways to maintain the quality while bringing your costs down as much as you can. Obviously, 7-Eleven is a huge business in Japan. And one thing that's interesting here is it's being run by a foreigner for the first time.

Yeah, that's right. As you say, he is the first non-Japanese national to hold this top job starting next month. He said his appointment has nothing to do with the fact that the company is facing this foreign buyout offer. But he did tell me about his background because his mother is Japanese, his father is American. His father actually used to work at 7-Eleven in the United States. And he told me what he thinks he can bring to the table. You know, I'm bilingual, bicultural.

I'm actually half. I grew up in Japan and in the U.S. So I have an innate understanding of our customers. You want to talk to some tough customers, you go talk to my aunts. And so I do understand that. And I think...

In that sense, I bring both that global experience as well as an understanding of how to get things done in Japan. So that's Stephen Dacus, the first foreign national to hold a top job at Japan's Seven Eye Holdings, which is the parent company of the world's biggest convenience chain store, 7-Eleven. I have to say, Andrew, he's kind of my new role model now.

Because every time my children complain about having to do Japanese homework, I'm going to tell them, see, if you're bilingual, if you know both cultures, see what you can offer. Strict Mom, Marika Oi with me now. There are reports that Apple is planning to move the production of iPhones sold in the U.S.,

from China to India. Why? In response to Donald Trump's tariffs, perhaps the US tech giant was already looking at its supply chain, but the ongoing trade war between China and the US seems to be speeding that process up. From Delhi, let's talk to Prabhu Ram, head of industry intelligence group Cyber Media Research. Prabhu, thank you very much indeed for being with us. What do you read into this shift that's being reported today?

Thank you so much for having me. India is an ongoing story for Apple. Much before all of these current developments, it's been a six-year story in the making. Increased investments in India from Apple. And it's largely because of the attractive domestic market as such. Just

Over two years ago, Apple opened two stores in Delhi and Mumbai, and there are plans to open up at least three to four more stores as such. You know, what has happened over the last six years is an increased emphasis on production from India, and that has accelerated now with the current developments. And as you rightly said, with all of the, you know, Trump tariffs,

are there. So India is contributing close to 20% of the global iPhone production. And we are estimating this to reach close to 26% or so this year. Both Foxconn as well as Tata Electronics are ramping up their production. And as we speak,

It's all about how they are able to achieve that scale moving forward. So it's going to happen anyway to an extent. Perhaps the tariffs have speeded the process up. And you can see for a company like Apple that hedging your bets, you know, spreading yourself so you're not beholden to one country, to this, you know, trade war sort of situation that we're seeing now or anything else is probably...

good business sense. It strikes me also that India's taken advantage of the situation. You'd expect a country or a big business to do where there are losers that are usually winners somewhere and India could be one out of it.

Absolutely. What we have seen is there has been an increased focus on infrastructure upgradation. And that plus also with all of the talent and the manpower that we have and the attractive market that India has currently, you know, we are seeing a premiumization wave, which means more Indian consumers are coming.

looking to buy the latest and the best as such. And Apple has been a key beneficiary, again, with the online store, as well as the two Apple-owned Apple, you know, retail stores as such in Delhi and Mumbai. What we are seeing now is with the policies that we have, you know,

India will be more aggressive in attractive investments as such. And companies beyond Apple as well will be looking to hedge their bets. And India, with all its infrastructure, is emerging not just as an attractive domestic market, but an export hub as such. Do you know how production costs of iPhones or other products for that matter –

you know, compare between China and India, is the production cost about the same? It would be the same way. You know, there are a lot of interdependencies as well, right? Like what we are seeing now is, you know, maturing value chain within India. You know, there is the dependency on China as well for components, you know. So it's not just about the cost efficiencies part, as I said. You know, it's just about how they could hedge their bets. And

India-made iPhones, the exports are increasing now to markets like US, Europe and other markets in them. And so that's in the last decade, if you were to see the role that China played, India will be taking that role in the next decade and will be a key focus for Apple. All right, Prabhu, thank you. That's Prabhu Ram, head of the industry intelligence group Cybermedia Research.

Now live to Shanti Kellerman, Chief Investment Officer of M&G. Well, thank you for being with us, Shanti. Really appreciate it. Let's stay with India for a second or two. Air India in talks about buying those Boeing planes that China don't want because of the tariffs.

Yeah, and it's something they've done in the past. They've picked up aircraft probably a little bit on the cheap that other airlines haven't been able to buy for what reason. If we reach some sort of a deal with the US and China on trade, maybe that could fall apart and they go back to China. But for now, you'll probably see some other airlines looking to get planes cheaper. OK, let's talk about stock in alphabet going up. Why?

So Google, which is the main business people are aware of, the parent company is Alphabet, their revenue went up about 12% in the last quarter. And that was mainly driven by the search engine still delivering a lot of revenue when you click on all those ads next to it.

There's been a lot of worries that AI might really eat into search engine revenue. Do you just go to chat GPT and do it instead of using Google? But that hasn't really happened. And they've also benefited from more demand for cloud computing services, for all those companies trying to start up their own AI offerings. Okay. Intel shares are down 8%. What's going on there?

Intel has been struggling to kind of turn itself around for the past several years, but they haven't really come up with a credible plan. They announced revenue and forward guidance for what they're going to do in the future that was below expectations in their results last night.

The main problem is that they just aren't really that competitive in the market for making chips for other companies where another company designs it and they build it. They're trying to get into that, which is kind of called the foundry market, but just really not getting any traction with customers. Sketchers are in the news. I'm seeing this one's been picked up by our colleagues at bbc.com slash news. Tell me what's going on there because they're warning their investors over tariffs.

Yeah. So what Skechers has done, which is I think something you might see a lot of companies doing is they've said to their investors, we're not giving you any guidance on how much revenue we're going to deliver this year. And investors usually really like to have those kind of projections say, oh, this year we're going to grow 10 to 12%.

Skechers has said because of the tariffs, the uncertainty, they can't credibly make that forecast, which was probably an accurate assessment. But it does kind of damage expectations and shareholder expectations. We just don't know what's going to happen this year. And as we reach the end of the week, I get the sense now that everyone like breathes a big sigh of relief saying, OK, we got through that week. Now we've got a couple of days before it all starts again.

Yeah, well, this was a pretty positive week. Most global equity indices were up, you know, things like S&P up 5% or so. So a pretty positive week, but I don't think the weekends are safe anymore either based on the past month or so. So we'll see what comes by Monday. Depends whether President Trump is playing golf or not in Florida. Thank you very much indeed for being with us, Shanti Kellerman, Chief Investment Officer of M&G Wealth. More about that Skechers story on our website. Also, with a slightly frightening image today,

a piece called Who Will Win the Race to Develop the First Humanoid Robot. BBC.com slash news for more. From me, Andrew Peach, and the team here on World Business Report, thanks for being with us.

When you have bars in the sky, onboard showers and award-winning in-flight entertainment, it's no surprise that Emirates was recently named the best airline in the world. We fly you to over 140 destinations, and with partners across the globe, we connect you to another 1,700 cities across six continents. So when we say we're also the largest international airline, what we really mean is...

If you're going there, so are we. Book now on Emirates.com. Fly Emirates. Fly better.