McCrann: BHP should wait for Anglo implosion
Anglo’s rejection of BHP was quite simply moronic, and now the ‘Big Australian’ can simply step back and watch as its smaller rival implodes.
Terry McCrann
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BHP is Australia’s biggest and most globally significant corporate player.
Outside the big four banks as a group, it is the single most important component in most Australian share investment portfolios.
While it is not quite the case that we should unquestionably accept that “what’s good for BHP is good for Australia” – the great, now long dead, mantra about General Motors and America.
It is simply unarguable that if BHP is doing well, so also is Australia.
Simply, because for the last twenty years or so both have been ‘long – very long – China’.
BHP’s now-abandoned bid to buy the – sprawling, to well past the point of any relationship to coherence - South African Anglo-American group, was really about building a mid-21st century post-China future.
BHP’s chairman Ken MacKenzie and CEO Mike Henry don’t and wouldn’t put it that way.
They talk of building BHP into a world that is decarbonising. With today’s BHP prospering entirely, and I mean entirely, on China and other countries doing the exact opposite - pumping a lot of carbon dioxide.
The one of two major product lines that BHP has that is supposed to still prosper in that – to my mind, imaginary – future is copper.
At its simplest, you need copper for batteries and the decarbonised future needs a lot of batteries.
Buying Anglo was all about buying a major copper project, in South America, where BHP has its biggest mine, Escondida in Chile, in partnership with arch Pilbara rival Rio Tinto.
Yes, BHP was also going to get Anglo’s premium coking coal operations next to its own in Queensland; and coking coal is nothing if it’s not pumping CO2.
But Anglo was really all about copper. Hence the demand Anglo hive off the big other bits - platinum and second-grade iron ore - before and separate from BHP’s acquisition.
And that’s where the deal foundered. Anglo demanded BHP do that after its acquisition.
No way, said BHP. That would mean replaying the great Billiton disaster, and give Anglo shareholders too big a stake in the combined BHP-Anglo group.
The rejection by Anglo was quite simply moronic. Reference my comment the other day; it was an exercise in telling BHP Santa Claus, to take his sack of gold and climb straight back up that chimney.
Anglo directors didn’t only pass up the golden opportunity to get their shareholders 20 per cent of an enlarged BHP.
They left themselves with the task of still having to do all the things that BHP wanted them to do; to sort out the chaotic, sprawling mess they have created in Anglo.
And do so, without BHP’s financial muscle. While it still has it - where goes China?
BHP now has two choices.
It can look for its quantum leap in copper somewhere else – including inside its two great iron ore rivals Rio, and Brazil’s Vale. Neither of which are really prospective.
Then there are a couple of Canadian companies, First Quantum and Teck, then Freeport and Newmont.
Or it can wait for the mess that is Anglo to implode, and seek to pick up its prize out of the wreckage.
Originally published as McCrann: BHP should wait for Anglo implosion
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