In my opinion we've got a lot of high quality assets that a good...

In my opinion we've got a lot of high quality assets that a good mid-tier miner would have. Not on the scale of BHP -- which is why they spun off S32 in the first place. They seem interested in having a small number of huge divisions of coal, copper, potash, etc. with long mine life in tier one locations. Just as you'd expect the world's biggest miner should!

I suspect the reasons why we were spun off still remain. Even if some of our assets would be desirable, I don't imagine BHP would want to be bothered with diverse assets such as tin, manganese, silver, aluminium, etc. I believe a lot of the assets spun off into this separate entity were acquired in the Billiton merger a decade earlier.

I like S32 because we don't have iron ore. I hold an ETF exposed to the Chinese internet on which I'm currently deep underwater! I like S32's future-facing commodities focus and the focus on buybacks along with a nice dividend. I'm keen to get that electrification-theme exposure without too much more China exposure (iron ore)! S32 is part of how I'm doing that and preparing for future shortages/commodity price increases.

BHP have nicely increased copper exposure through the OZ Minerals deal. Rio has taken out Turquoise Hill in Mongolia. I very much doubt they'd care about Hermosa -- only part of which is copper. I think it's mostly silver and manganese, without checking. I can think of other ways BHP would get copper exposure without Hermosa.

There are two small cap stocks on the ASX I'm thinking about in particular, with big projects awaiting finance, permits in place, and awaiting finance which would be a much simpler transaction. One in SA and the other in WA. I hold one of these small caps, without cross-promoting it. Or they could just buy Sandfire and take the new Botswana, and existing Spain mines SFR currently hold.

I believe (might be wrong) that UK listed Glencore was rumoured to be a potential suitor for S32 around the time we listed. Then commodity prices crashed and those articles/rumours went away. It's got 4 x the market cap of S32 and the type of diverse assets we hold. I've compared our share price with Glencore in the past and it's pretty much an identical graph. I'd be pretty annoyed if such a thing transpired. Glencore would be a more logical purchaser than BHP.