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yes Mx agree. remember this interview on lateline Business on the 16/6/08. some of the comments made, gee how things have changed, but i still note AM with his usual BS.


ANDREW MICHELMORE: I think as you look at both companies, BHP and Rio, and if we take Rio, they have extremely good assets that are reasonable in the size of operations for a company around 100 billion in size. But when you put them together with BHP and you have a company that's 450 to 500 billion, those same assets although very good, become a very small part of it and if they're a stand alone group may well be hard to justify leaving within the combined organisation.

They're the sorts of assets we'd be interested in. They would be significant for us, but they would be small for a combined BHP and Rio. They're the sorts of opportunities we should look for.

ALI MOORE: Anything you can name?

ANDREW MICHELMORE: No, I wouldn't want to flag exactly the ones we've got our eyes on, but we've done background work on ones we believe that may well be looked at as a divestment for them and we want to flag that we'd be interested to talk to them about them.

OWEN HEGARTY: Well, I think that we're probably always the prey, particularly as we've got excellent assets, a great growth pipeline. We've got strategic advantage with our exploration and we've got a great group of people. So I think we're always going to be being looked at by the bigger companies and the other mid caps around there.

So what we have to do is exactly as Andrew has explained it. We've got to continue powering on with the strategy, continuing to grow our business. Build that organic growth pipeline. Look at acquisitions, continue to grow the share price, it's harder to hit a moving target, as they say.

ALI MOORE: Harder to hit a moving target, but Andrew Michelmore you've sold a company before, do you think you could end up selling this one?

ANDREW MICHELMORE: If that comes along, that comes along, but that's not the approach that either I, the management team, or the board's taking. You can never prevent someone from coming along and making an offer as Owen's just mentioned. If we run with the projects, we run with excellence of operations, we grow through acquisitions, get the support of our shareholders and add shareholder value, then if someone wants to buy us, that's up to them, but they'll end up having to pay a damn good premium if they came at us.