As the mine turns

One sure way to get vertigo has been to try and follow the machinations in the world of international mining - particularly in the past few weeks.
It all started, of course, with Alcoa’s attempt last year to take over Alcan. Alcan rejected the U.S. company’s bid in no uncertain terms, then fell swooning into the open arms of Rio Tinto after the UK-Aussie giant made an offer Alcan couldn’t refuse. No sooner had we all digested that than the other UK-Aussie giant, BHP Billiton, went after Rio Tinto.
Its original offer rejected, BHP has now gone hostile with a slightly sweetened version hoping RT shareholders will go where its board of directors won’t. Where it gets really nutty is what happens if BHP is successful. The expectation is the resulting behemoth would have to sell off a chunk of its various assets in order to get the regulatory go-ahead from numerous countries. And apparently BHP’s CEO would happily ditch RT’s Alcan smelters because smelters don’t, as far as he is concerned, make enough profit for the amount of money invested.
So who would be at the head of the queue looking to snap up those smelters, ours included? None other than Alcoa, the one which started this whole merry-go-round. And even if Rio Tinto fends off BHP, Alcoa could still be in the game. That’s because it, in concert with Chinese government backed Chinalco, has bought nine per cent of RT’s shares. Analysts point out that the value of those shares just happens to be pretty close to that of Alcan’s smelters. Leading to a scenario where Alcoa-Chinalco trade their shares back to RT in exchange for those smelters? Time will tell - and it will doubtless be a heck of a lot more complicated than that. But if, when all the alumina dust has settled, Alcan smelters do end up in the hands of Alcoa, it will be a homecoming of sorts. As they say in smelter-rich Quebec, plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.
– Northern Sentinel (Kitimat)