Rinehart’s Hancock weighs $3.3 billion iron ore mine project
Hancock acquired a 51% interest in the Mt Bevan project from Legacy Iron Ore Ltd. and Hawthorn Resources.
JSW Steel has almost clinched a deal that would see India’s third-largest steel company acquire embattled London Mining (LON:LOND), sources close to the negotiations revealed on Friday.
“JSW Steel is very close to finalizing a deal to acquire London Mining which is battling big debts amid crashing iron-ore prices and the Ebola outbreak in Africa, where it operates a mine,” Moneycontrol.com of India quoted a source as saying.
While the news outlet was stonewalled by JSW in its attempt for a comment on the rumour, it noted JSW’s open-ness to expansion through acquisitions.
“As a long term strategy, we would like to expand both organically by means of brownfield and greenfield expansions and inorganically by acquiring some existing assets,” according to a filing by JSW on the Bombay Stock Exchange.
Controlled by billionaire Sajjan Jindal, JSW may just be the white knight that LOND needs to make a comeback. The steelmaker has been eyeing up raw materials and steelmaking capacity outside India having secured mining assets in Chile, Mozambique and the United States, according to Reuters.
London Mining has seen its equity decimated in recent days due to statements that its lenders are not expecting to provide short-term funding. On Wednesday, the firm admitted to investors that its shares “have little or no value” due to funding fears. Rumours of a takeover, however, caused LOND to triple on Friday, with shares trading up 235 percent.
London Mining, which owns the Marampa mine, is one of several small miners set up in West Africa during the commodities boom, on the back of rising demand for iron ore. They hoped to turn the region into a new producing frontier, to compete with Australia and Brazil.
But with larger, lower-cost producers like Rio Tinto (LON:RIO, NYSE:RIO) and BHP Billiton (NYSE:BHP, ASX:BHP) pumping out cheaper ore – and prices languishing below $80 per tonne – they have struggled.
The miner is just one of the most recent casualties in the iron ore market. Companies big and small are suffering from record low prices for iron ore in the face of oversupply and weak demand from key consumer China.
BHP acknowledged last week that some projects would be casualties of the lower price for iron ore.
2 Comments
Peter
Indian Companies always are ready to take advantage of companies which are struggling like what they did to KCM PLC by Vedatta Group which has been lotting the company with inpunity.
Larry Southwick
It’s not over until it’s over
As noted earlier, in the case of projects in West Africa in general, and for London
Mining specifically, the Ebola crisis will be a major impediment to maintaining
production. Further, London Mining has a variety of economic and operational burdens that need to be resolved and improved to fully achieve optimum costs and maximize iron ore production rate.
In any case, one cannot get iron ore from Sierra Leone to India by “looting” the
assets of LM (with or without impunity). The assets have no value unless ore is being shipped. Ebola may “loot” the assets, at least for now, but when that is brought under control and China decides it needs more ore such that prices start to rise back into the favorable zone for LM, then Marampa should be able to fully realize its potential.
By taking this first acquisition step, JSW at the very least takes LM off the “casualty list” for iron ore producers, preserves an opportunity for a quick return to profitable operation and acquires a source to relieve its feedstock supply
needs.