James Gard: Welcome to Morningstar. Our latest stock of the week is Swiss mining and trading giant Glencore.
Now I wouldn’t say M&A specialists have been twiddling their thumbs for the last year, but things got awfully quiet in 2022. And along comes a big one, in the mining sector of all places, which used to do mega mergers and acquisitions before capital discipline took over.
London listed Glencore made a 23 billion dollar bid for Canada’s Teck Resources, 20% above its market value. The big target is Teck’s copper resources, which are in high demand as the arms race for battery metals hots up. The idea is that the combined firm would take two forms: MetalsCo, copper, nickel and zinc (and commodity trading). Rather unimaginatively, the spun off coal division would be named “CoalCo”. And the combined firm woulbe known as Glenteck.
Unfortunately, Teck has rejected the approach, saying that it undervalues the company. It also says that it’s not for sale anway. Morningstar anlaysts think the bid has a 50% chance of going through at the moment: Glencore’s options are to raise its bid, pitch directly to Teck shareholders or walk away. Other bidders may emerge too.
Luckily our analysts cover both stocks: they’ve raised Teck’s fair value to 40 dollars but they’ve cut Glencore’s to 5 pounds 60, which means the shares are undervalued at around 4 pounds 60. Glencore shares are off 16% this year anyway.
For Morningstar, I’m James Gard.