CHARTS: The coming critical minerals trade war is BRICS short of a load
"While a large number of countries around the world continue to talk about securing raw material supply, China is actually doing something about it."
British Telecom on Friday had to talk down the value of its 75 million miles of copper cables criss-crossing the United Kingdom after an analyst at investment bank Investec calculated that the scrap value of the copper is £50 billion ($77 billion) at today’s prices.
Given the fact that the London stock market puts a value on BT Group Plc of only £13 billion ($20 billion), the telecoms firm could be guilty of not sweating its assets enough. But perhaps, says the analyst, in the future BT could use the proceeds to fund the roll-out of its fibre optic network, although the cost of digging up the landlines would be hard to pin down.
The Guardian quotes from Morten Singleton, an analyst at Investec’s note: “We contacted BT investor relations, and they are not arguing with the maths, agreeing that BT does have some 75m miles of copper cabling and that using a £5,000 per tonne spot price for copper this could be worth circa £50bn. But BT suggests the cost for its extraction are entirely unknown, and there are all sorts of issues, regulatory and otherwise.”
“As an academic exercise this raises an interesting point. While any current fibre-to-the-premise rollout is not replacing the copper cable, there will come a time when the copper is no longer required, and can be scrapped. Even if this takes 20 years, or more, it could arguably fund the deeper rollout of fibre of the network, or special returns to investors.”
The Telegraph quotes a BT spokesman: “The tongue-in-cheek article has massively overestimated the amount of copper in BT’s network. Their back-of-a-fag-packet sums are highly inaccurate and so no one should think that BT is sitting on a hidden copper mine. Even if their sums were accurate, we think our customers might object were we to suddenly send out thousands of engineers with spades to dig up their landlines.”
2 Comments
Roger
The inm-situ value is quite different than the recovered value. Something that people outside the mining industry seldom consider.
Jigsy
…and they never will.