00:00Let's take a look as well at how miners are faring in Australia in the early goings.
00:04Of course, there's been this back and forth between BHP and Anglo-American
00:09as there was some talk that maybe they would be approaching this takeover,
00:14but almost just as quickly as we heard the news that seems to have unwinded for the moment,
00:20still amid this general positive mood in markets.
00:24You're seeing the miners in the green.
00:26Copper is not really giving us that much direction.
00:29Let's get more on this latest back and forth between BHP and Anglo-American
00:33with Bloomberg Metals and Mining reporter Paul Allen Hunt.
00:37Paul, it's been a year.
00:39Why did BHP come back for Anglo?
00:44At the end of the day, it's all about the fundamentals.
00:46Copper is key to the energy transition.
00:49It's key to electrification and it's key in the rise of data centers and things like that.
00:55So this is an area that BHP really sees growth in.
00:59It sees growth in two assets, in two areas or two commodities.
01:03That is potash and copper, the red metal.
01:06So it's all about copper.
01:07The other thing is that the copper universe is quite small.
01:11So if we look at copper major stocks, major copper stocks, they're pretty rare.
01:15Projects of the size that Anglo have and the quality that Anglo have are really hard to come by.
01:22And finding new copper deposits is just getting harder and harder and they're becoming harder to mine.
01:28So BHP is looking around.
01:31It identified Anglo last year as a beautiful target that it really wanted to make a deal with.
01:36However, that didn't happen.
01:39Now, Anglo and tech have made an agreement to merge together or to have a deal of their own.
01:45And BHP pretty much saw time running out as a shareholder vote between Anglo and tech resources comes to the fore in a few weeks.
01:53Why couldn't BHP do better if they really need Anglo?
02:01Well, this is it.
02:02It was never going to be easy.
02:03It certainly wasn't going to be easy last year and it wasn't going to be easy this time.
02:08We don't have a lot of detail.
02:10I will say that at this point.
02:12We only broke it last night, of course, this story.
02:14But we do know that it was Scrip or shares and cash.
02:19The premium that BHP would have had to have offered to get a real serious recognition from Anglo and have a proper discussion would have been significantly higher.
02:29So when Anglo rejected BHP or rebuffed BHP last year, it went on to divest some of its non-core assets to simplify its business.
02:39And shareholders rewarded Anglo by sending the share price higher.
02:43So BHP really would have had to have offered a significant premium.
02:48Then there's also some of the other issues that we saw last year.
02:51So antitrust, you know, they would have had to have won over regulators in South Africa.
02:57And copper stocks generally have been trading higher.
03:01So those are a few of the many challenges that BHP would have had to have embarked on.
03:07And that's not even starting on China antitrust or some of the other issues.
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