"A little bird tells me 200 people made redundant today accross...

"A little bird tells me 200 people made redundant today accross daunia and blackwater. Trimming the bhp fat."

Apropos BHP fat: From the accounts I've heard, there is a lot of it.

I personally know an individual who is quite senior in the procurement department at the Blackwater complex. Family lives in Brisbane and so he does FIFO. But only works on site from Tuesday to Thursday. On Tuesday he catches a morning flight which gets him into the mine office by midday and then on Thursday at midday he's headed out back home again at lunch time. All air and cab fares obviously picked up by the company.

Smiling broadly, he told me he does very little on the Monday and Friday when he's at home and not much even when on the mine. All the tendering, order placement, inventory management and auditing are basically automated, and have been for years. He admitted that his job had become obsolete even before Covid. He didn't tell me what he earned, but I'm certain it is not less than the $180k pa mark.

In the civil service bureaucracy that is BHP, I am certain there are many like this case.

200 redundant heads at an average cost to company of $250k pa means $50m pa of cost savings. Capitalise that at a mere 8x multiple and you get $0.4bn of value liberation, which itself is a meaningful component of what WHC paid for the BHP assets.

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