About Us
Our Team
SCM Decisions has extensive experience providing Integrated Valuation and Risk Modelling (IVRM) advisory services to the natural resources industries. Our team has more than 60 years of combined professional experience assessing the value and risk of natural resource projects and their associated financing structures.
Dr. Michael Samis, P.Eng. is a leading IVRM practitioner in the natural resource industries with more than 30 years of industry experience. He has extensive professional expertise valuing base and precious metals, diamond, and petroleum projects with complex forms of flexibility and risk. His assignments have ranged from exploration to late-stage capital investments and have included project financing and contingent taxes.
Mike was an Associate Partner and Senior Manager in the Toronto office of Ernst and Young's Transaction Advisory Service for 11 years, where he valued complex financial securities such as employee stock options, convertible debt with embedded derivatives, contingent contracts, and financial derivatives in addition to his valuation work in the mining industry.
Before this, he worked as AMEC's Technical Director of Mineral Economics, a freelance mining consultant, and various production and technical roles in the South African mining industry.
Mike has a Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia that combines the fields of mining engineering and finance and an M.Sc. in Mineral Economics from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has also been recognized by the Canadian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy for his contributions to mineral economics with the Robert Elver award in 2013 and as Distinguished Lecturer in 2017.
David Laughton, Ph.D.
Technical Advisor
Since the early 1980’s, Dr. David Laughton has been a leading authority on the use of financial market information and valuation methods to improve a company’s capacity to make real asset decisions. In particular, he shows how companies can avoid common investment biases, such as that against long-term assets, by better understanding how different combinations of uncertainty and asset structure affect asset value and risk. His methods also show clients how to estimate the value consequences from the impact that current decisions have on future flexibility.
His work is based in part on his own applied research as an independent consultant to many of the largest extractive resource organizations and through positions he has had at the MIT Center for Energy Policy Research, the Canadian Department of Finance, and the University of Alberta.
Because of his consulting and research, he has been asked to write review papers and organize meetings on real asset decision-making in general and climate change issues in particular.
His current research interests include the systematic analysis of extractive industry fiscal regimes, how to use geostatistical data in decision analysis, climate change and asset valuation, and expanding the suite of numerical methods available for performing and presenting complex decision analyses.
He has a Ph.D. in Physics from Princeton and a Ph.D. in Financial Economics from MIT.