Company Will "Look Somewhere Else" If Bid Fails
Australia’s New Hope Corporation, which last week had a revised takeover bid for Macarthur Coal turned down, has said that it will look for other acquisitions if, as seems likely, its bid for Macarthur is unsuccessful.
Speaking to Australia’s ABC TV network on Sunday, New Hope Chairman Rob Millner said “Obviously there are other avenues for us. If we can’t find anything in coal, we’ll have to go and look somewhere else. Going forward, there’s a real shortage of particularly pulverized coal in the world, and most of the ports around the world are constrained by capacity, so I see a good future for coal, both thermal and PCI coal.”
Commenting on the Macarthur bid, Mr Millner said: “If we secured Macarthur that would probably steady us up for the time being (with acquisitions). But, you know, it's certainly going to create a very large independent coal company with a market capitalisation of well over $8 billion and it would be in the top 30 to 40 companies within Australia."
Meanwhile, Andrew Harrington, a coal analyst at Paterson Securities, told ABC “They [New Hope] don’t have any debt on their balance sheet. They’ve got A$1.5 billion in cash in the bank and probably another half billion coming from the sale of their Arrow Energy shares, so they could easily plonk down the cash and raise some financing to afford this.”
New Hope’s revised takeover bid for Macarthur - its second bid - included A$950 million in cash, but it was rejected by the Macarthur board on 15 April. Macarthur said the New Hope bid did not represent an adequate premium for control of the company. Macarthur said on Friday that it intends to enter into talks with US miner Peabody Energy, which raised its bid to A$16 a share, valuing Macarthur at A$4.1 billion.
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