Canada’s Hudbay Minerals (TSX, NYSE: HBM) has inked a deal with Rockcliff Metals (CNSX: RCLF) to acquire all the shares it doesn’t already own in the copper-focused exploration company.
The deal will see Rockcliff shareholders receive 0.006776 of a Hudbay common share for each common share held in the company.
The transaction, Hudbay said, has the potential to further extend the productive life at the company’s Snow Lake operations in Manitoba by consolidating ownership in the Talbot copper-gold deposit.
The acquisition of Rockcliff, one of the biggest landholders in the Snow Lake area, more than triples Hudbay’s prospective land package in the region.
“The Talbot deposit and the additional Rockcliff satellite deposits provide further optionality and potential future feed sources for our Stall and New Britannia mills,” Hudbay’s chief executive officer Peter Kukielski said in the statement.
Hudbay and Rockcliff are joint venture partners on the copper-zinc Talbot project, in which the explorer has a 49% stake. Rockcliff also owns 100% of six additional deposits in the Snow Lake region.
Hudbay Minerals has been on a buying spree this year, closing last week a planned merger with Copper Mountain Mining Corporation (TSX: CMMC).
That deal handed Hudbay the Copper Mountain mine in Canada’s province of British Columbia, located about 20 km south of Princeton and 300 km east of the port of Vancouver.
It also made the combined company Canada’s third largest copper miner, after Teck and Vale, with an estimated 2023 production of 53,000 tonnes.