Wanblad says Anglo not a sitting duck

Duncan Wanblad, CEO, Anglo American

ANGLO American CEO Duncan Wanblad didn’t believe his group would fall victim to a takeover once he had completed a radical restructuring of the historic mining house.

“I don’t believe this is inevitable at all,” Wanblad was quoted as saying by the Financial Times. “To the extent that we are valued in the context of the sum of our parts and fully valued, we will be a very viable, standalone company.”

Wanblad, who was speaking at the Joburg Indaba conference in Johannesburg last week, said the company was on track to finalise the restructuring by next year. He said he could not predict what will happen after that, said the Financial Times.

“I cannot say what other people are going to do from a corporate action point of view and I don’t really care about that — what I care about is delivering on the strategy,” he said.

Anglo plans to demerge its majority stake in Anglo American Platinum and either sell or demerge and list De Beers. Before these transactions, Wanblad said it was likely the group will have sold its metallurgical coal mines in Australia.

The restructuring came amid a takeover proposal from BHP which ultimately failed.

Asked at the FT Mining Summit last month about making a fresh bid for Anglo at the end of next month, when the UK’s “put up or shut up” six month embargo has elapsed, Wandita Pant, BHP’s CFO, said: “We have moved on”.

Miningmx quoted Wanblad as saying at the Joburg Indaba that there might be one more opportunity for his company to sell off more shares in Amplats before it demerges the company “during the course of next year”.

Anglo sold around 14 million Amplats shares, equivalent to about 5% of the company, in September in a “bookbuild” which Wanblad said was aimed at doing two things of which the main one was to minimise a flowback in the shares after the demerger.

“The prime driver was to pre-emptively put some of the stock into the right hands prior to the demerger and this was absolutely successful,” said Wanblad.