April 09, 2008
BHP Rises After Report China Will Buy Stake
BHP Billiton, the world's biggest mining company, rose to the highest in almost four months in New York trading after a newspaper report that China will buy a stake.
China is in the early stages of planning to buy a bigger stake in BHP than the 9% of Rio Tinto Group acquired by state-owned Aluminum Corp. of China and US aluminium producer Alcoa, a newspaper report said, citing unidentified people in Beijing. BHP depositary receipts climbed as much as 5.6%, valuing the Melbourne-based company at $US191 billion.
China's steel industry is the world's largest consumer of iron ore, which Melbourne-based BHP mines in Western Australia. BHP made a $US156 billion hostile bid for Rio in February that would create a company controlling more than a third of the world's iron-ore supply and vie with Brazil's Cia. Vale do Rio Doce as the largest producer.
''If Chinalco was allowed to buy a stake in Rio, I don't see why they couldn't get a similar amount of BHP,'' Richard Knights, an analyst at Numis Securities in London, said today by phone. ''They wouldn't be doing it if they didn't think at some point they could assert some kind of influence.''
BHP depositary receipts climbed $US2.81, or 4.3%, to $US68.84 as of 12.54pm in New York. A close at that price would be the highest since December 10. Earlier, the stock advanced 4.6% to 1762 pence on the London Stock Exchange.
Illtud Harri, a London-based spokesman for BHP, and Rio spokesman Nick Cobban, both declined to comment on the report in The Australian newspaper. Zhao Shangsen, an official at the Chinese Embassy in London, said the embassy couldn't comment on the report.
Regulatory Approval
Rio, which is based in London, rejected BHP's offer on February 6, saying it ''significantly'' undervalued the company. BHP is due later this month to lodge its application for the deal to be cleared by European Union antitrust regulators.
The price of iron ore has risen to a record for a sixth straight year. In February, Vale won a 71% increase for ore from its Carajas mine from Nippon Steel, JFE Holdings, and Posco, Asia's three largest steelmakers.
The raw material accounts for 13% of BHP's fiscal 2007 sales. Coking coal, another material used to make steel, has tripled. China is also the largest user of aluminum, which accounted for 15 percent of the company's revenue, and coal.
Rio and BHP, the second and third-largest iron-ore exporters, are still in talks with Asian steelmakers for 2008 contracts. The steel companies are resisting Rio's demand for a so-called ''freight premium'' to reflect the lower cost for Asian customers of shipping ore from Australia rather than Brazil.
Bloomberg