"Hard to say how good the bhp assets are but the ev is surely...

"Hard to say how good the bhp assets are but the ev is surely higher now than when coal was 400 and they had 1 or 2bn cash"

For starters, the market doesn't value mining equities on what the prevailing spot price for any given commodity is; it values them on a collective perception of what the commodity price is expected to do over the market's investment time horizon (typically, 12-18 months prospectively)

Secondly, at the time the coal price was $400/t they had less than $1.0bn in net cash (equivalent to $1.20/share) . Today they have $2.5bn (3.00/share). So that explains the $1.80/share of the variance.

As for you not knowing how good the BHP assets are, you can't serious? You don't know whether or not coking coal mines have higher margins than themal coal operations? After that BHP deal is consummated, 70% of WHC's output will be a coal type which currently fetches more than US$300/t and for which the production cost is less than half of the selling price. And then there are the highly attractive acquisition terms (especially the highly favourable funding arrangements).

Hard to equivocate between WHC in 2022 and WHC in 2024: in many respects it is a markedly different company.

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