Anglo American Agrees to Buy Teck in Mining Deal

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00:00Martin, just talk us about the significance of this deal and what we know about the detail.

00:06Okay, I will start with the significance of this deal, which, as you said, it's one of the biggest

00:11mining deals in the past decade or more. This combines two major copper producers. Everyone

00:21in the mining industry is desperately looking for more exposure to copper. This creates a company

00:28that would be among the top five producers. And it comes, obviously, after last year, BHP

00:35failed in its bid to buy Anglo. That bid turned out to be very complicated, protracted. Since then,

00:44Anglo has simplified its business. Tech has also offloaded some assets. And they're combining

00:50together to create what will hopefully be a cleaner, very copper-focused company. And that's

00:57what they've very much emphasised in their release today. It's all about copper.

01:04Martin, why does this deal work and others don't? Why does Anglo want tech and not another

01:11business? What is it about this transaction that is different to all the other deals that

01:15have been talked about over the last few years?

01:17There have been a lot of other deals, not just deals that the executives have tried to make

01:26publicly, but also a lot of chatter about who should or could merge with who in the mining

01:32space. In 2023, we had Glencore trying to take over tech. That turned out to be too complicated

01:40due to both the structure and the shareholding structure of tech. BHP's bid for Anglo, that

01:48didn't come off again. These were two quite complex companies. It was a complex transaction

01:55because Anglo has a lot of different assets. Here, we have a company, Anglo, that's already

02:02sort of downsizing itself, spinning off assets like steel, coal, like diamonds, like nickel

02:11to focus more on what it sees as its core business. Tech has sold coal as well. So these are companies

02:18which are much more suddenly focused on copper. And it's a much more kind of simple proposition

02:24to the investors. I think the figure they're giving is 70% copper focused. The rest is mainly iron ore

02:33and zinc.