- Takeover fever and takeover fear take hold .. and Wall St banks say buy gold
28th March 2018
Tim Treadgold
Takeover time in the mining sector gathered pace in the shortened pre-Easter week when OZ Minerals launched a bid for copper explorer Avanco -- prompting a sell-off in OZ shares and serving as a warning for investors to watch out for over-eager managers.
The cash and shares offer from OZ is small beer in the overall mining market and while it helped double the Avanco share price from 8c to 16c it rubbed 20c off OZ’s share pric, which closed yesterday at $9.
The problem with some mining mergers was flagged last month by one of the world’s top investment managers, Evy Hambro, co-head of the BlackRock Natural Resources Fund.
In a telling section of his annual results report, Hambro said investors were “at the mercy of management teams” who could lose discipline and revert to their bad old ways of value destruction.
OZ management would argue that its agreed merger with Avanco will create value in the long run, but right now it can be seen that OZ shareholders are worse off as investors follow the old maxim of buying the target and selling the bidder.
Whether OZ is at the start of a new wave of mergers and acquisitions will be interesting to watch because there are a number of cashed-up miners looking for growth options after two years of rising commodity prices.
Interestingly, at least one big investment bank was unimpressed with OZ’s proposed merger with Avanco. Credit Suisse stuck with a sell tip on OZ and a price target of $8.55, down 5% on yesterday’s price, and down 10% on the price at the start of the week.