Great post,
@Luck101,
but I would like to fundamentally disagree on one point:
M
IN had in no way acted as a sort of straw man for Hancock and on Gina's behalf in the WGO battle.You could easily read that out of the situation, but it was the other way around:
MIN prevented Hancock's actual plans and acted exclusively in its own interests...
Hancock's real plan at the time was to gain a strategic position in STX.
This would have succeeded if Hancock had converted its share position of 40 to a maximum of 50% in WGO with the "swap" offered by Strike for WGO into a position of around 20% in STX at the time. This would then have been the strategic starting position for Hancock for an STX takeover. That was Gina's actual goal.
This is why, for example, when Hancock increased the offer for WGO from the original 28c to 36c per WGO-share, the strange condition was attached that Hancock would reach 40% (and not 50% as one would expect) of WGO with this offer. This condition only made sense because they did not want to exceed the 50% hurdle.
The moves on the part of MIN's M&A department were then outstandingly intelligent:
Initially, MIN had acquired exactly 200,000,000 shares and thus around 16% of WGO.
After the Hancock offer for WGO had found sufficient acceptance, MIN increased its own position to 19.x%, only to immediately accept Hancock's offer.
At this point, many people think that MIN acted in Hancock's interests, but in fact MIN increased Hancock's ownership in WGO to
50.54% and thus above the 50% threshold.The result of this move on the part of MIN was that the
automatic extension of the offer
for 14 days was triggered for Hancock.
The closing date for Hancock was actually February 10, 2023 and that of Strike February 14.
Thus, STX could not have prevented it if Hancock had "suddenly" decided to accept the STX offer and the swap. Now, however, the closing date for Hancocks offer has been "automatically" extended to February 24,
because the 19.x% of MIN has now landed Hancock at 50.54%...
What an intelligent and smart move by MIN, because now STX could take the opportunity and accept the Hancock offer and at the same time exclude that Hancock makes a strategic move for STX itself...
MIN has prevented a possible strategic position of Hancock in STX because they themselves have a vested interest in a take-over of STX.
Hancock and MIN are fierce competitors in energy. Both need energy security for their big plans with lithium and other mining activities and at least MIN has already defined energy as one of its new important growth pillars (which certainly cannot be achieved with the activities with Lockyer Deep and Erregulla North alone, which have so far fallen short of expectations...).
I don't want to rule out the possibility that the two want to prevent a "battle" for Strike among themselves and are therefore now seeking a joint discussion. But the narrative MIN "helped" Gina with WGO is imho completely wrong...
So it would be nice if there were other interested parties in STX, should things get going here... Mitsui comes to mind...
Just for cherry, here the short version:
- Hancock’s plan was to launch a t/o for Strikewith the swap of 40+% of WGO shares at 36c.
- MIN bought their initial position in WGO to prevent an easy success of theHancock plan.
- With MINs increase to just below 20% of WGO they created the super smart opportunity to kick the ballinto Strike’s field…
- Strike scored the goal by closing their own offer on Feb 13th and acceptingthe Hancock offer and hence, preventing the swap and therefore a possible strategic position of Hancock in STX…
(20min delay)