Big - built from Broken Hill and the emerging Bass Strait Oil and Gas fields and Iron Ore industry in WA - and some takeovers of Utah for the Bowen Basin coal assets, WMC for Olympic Dam and Ni assets - none of which the current management can take credit for.
Slow - have had zero exploration success since the discovery of Cannington in QLD, their last discovery. Brought the entire Billiton asset group and then later spun them all out as S32, the continual will they or won't they question of the WA Ni assets....
Stupid - OK Tedi, Ravensthorpe Ni debacle, disposing of Phosphate Hill, Athabasca Potash misadventure, US Oil Shale investment and write-downs, Resolution Cu over investment before permitting completed, disposing of remaining oil and gas assets into Woodside which has flourished since.
Bureaucratic - 3 repeated attempts at Olympic Dam expansion projects all of them repeating the same work over again, repeat that at every major BHP site from Chile to Australia and add up the cost of that. Mt Arthur mine in NSW attempted disposal, so slow that they managed to fail to sell it and it ended up being the embarrassing star performer for BHP.
As you say - Li may end up being a "flash in the pan" industry, or maybe not, but you can bet that if it isn't, then BHP will enter at the top of the market and exit at the bottom of the market, given its recent track record on many other commodities. They are probably better off sticking to iron ore with its huge profit margins and low technical risk - essentially logistics businesses and not a great deal of mining expertise involved in that.
Most of these criticisms are of the Kloppers and MacKenzie era of BHP - since 2007-08 have a look at the share price of BHP, since then lots of value destruction and depletion of world class orebodies for fairly modest dividends and after having seen the company from the inside and the outside myself I don't think it would be much of a surprise to many here that you would be investing in BHP despite management and not because of it.
BHP Price at posting:
$43.97 Sentiment: None Disclosure: Not Held
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