Hong Kong’s stock exchange operator said on Friday its $2.2 billion offer is the preferred bid for the London Metal Exchange.
A takeover of the LME, which handles some 80% of global trade in metals futures, will help Hong Kong diversify out of its slow-growing equities business and help the 135-year old LME to compete better against Asian hubs like Singapore.
The LME’s board plans to recommend shareholders accept the offer at a meeting expected before the end of July, reports the Toronto Star.
The three losing bids were all from US operators – IntercontinentalExchange, CME Group and NYSE Euronext – and the deal marks a decisive shift in the commodities trading business away from Chicago and London to Asia.
The LME is one of the last bastions of open outcry trading and the system may well turn out to be a victim of the takeover.
The LME last year cleared and matched its first gold trade and has also began providing silver market data. Over the last 7 years electronic trading has grown from 2% to over 70% of the LME’s market volume and trading volumes have surged.
Comments
Samarendra Dey
We in troubled times intend to make the most brash decisions that brings out the bitterness of regret, looking glass gives us this contemplation be it the individual or the collective when we run amok to seek alliances and all we get is venture capitalists who are habitual to strip tease just as the Vulture who awaits for the Loin to kill have his fill leave then the next lot of scavengers the end is the Vulture who strips the flesh of the bones.
We need to see why nature has provide us with this very live looking glass to reflect from but as humans once we have the throne we disregard what natural instincts guide our conscious state teaches us to hold what is comfortable any access will trip the wire of this comfort and greed will set in this greed is the false power that creates the weakness of arrogance that consoles the regret to eat away like rust the caner of the soul which infects hundres of lives that are in trust dependent.
Emerging Markets are the consistent stepping stone to this climb quality becomes secondary to the need of collection that weakens the muscle tone to collapse and renew the overloading out of control human accountability that brought down ions of civilizations.
Greed is the bacon of human tragedies.
Samarendra Dey
Concept creators Limited UK