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https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mining-giant-strikes-gold-as-it-takes-ftse-crown-mkq8dmlw7
BHP has become the most valuable company in the FTSE 100 for the first time after rebounding strongly from the pandemic.
The market capitalisation of the world’s biggest mining group stands at almost £115 billion, ahead of Unilever on nearly £107 billion. BHP overtook the consumer goods powerhouse to take the top spot last month, data from Refinitiv shows.
The Anglo-Australian miner has been buoyed by rises in the prices of iron ore and copper, its biggest commodities. Its shares have more than doubled in value since their recent nadir on March 12 last year, when markets crashed as the pandemic took hold, and are up about 18 per cent from a year ago. They closed up 9½p, or 0.5 per cent, at £20.44 today. By contrast, the FTSE 100 index of Britain’s biggest publicly quoted companies, which closed at 6,489.33, remains down by about 13 per cent from a year ago.
BHP, which produces commodities including iron ore, copper, coal and oil, reported net profits of $8 billion in the year to June 2020. It has about 80,000 employees and contractors worldwide, with operations concentrated in Australia and the Americas, and makes most of its revenue by selling to China.
Iron ore, used in steelmaking, is BHP’s biggest earner, accounting for about half of its revenues and two thirds of its underlying profits in its last financial year. Copper accounted for about a quarter of its revenues and about a fifth of its underlying profits. Iron ore prices hit their highest level in almost ten years in January amid a strong recovery in demand from China, while copper prices touched eight-year highs.
Despite BHP’s size, the company has a relatively low public profile in Britain and in recent years perhaps has been best known for its co-ownership of the Samarco mining venture in Brazil, where a waste dam collapse in 2015 killed 19 people and caused Brazil’s worst environmental disaster.
BHP has a dual-listed company structure comprising two parent companies: BHP Group Plc, listed in London, and BHP Group Limited, listed in Australia.
The structure means that although BHP operates as one company, only the London-listed entity, which accounts for about £43 billion of its value, is counted as a constituent in the weighting of the FTSE 100. It now accounts for about 2.4 per cent of the index, according to London Stock Exchange data.
Unilever’s shares still have the most bearing on the wider index.
Under the leadership of Mike Henry, BHP is preparing to quit the production of polluting thermal coal, which is burnt in power stations and is a significant contributor to climate change, and is seeking to grow its presence in “future-facing” metals such as copper and nickel.
In a recent note Deutsche Bank said that the company was “facing strategic challenges due to its core commodity mix”, questioning how its coking coal and oil businesses would be rated by climate-con
I think you forgot to mention this, SEC Charges Audit Firm and Suspends Accountants for Deficient Audits
https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2018-302
Gareth is the inventor, he deserves every penny!!!
He's not a director anymore!!!
Face masks lower the risk of spreading large Covid-linked droplets when speaking or coughing by up to 99.9%, a lab experiment with mechanical mannequins and human subjects has found.
A woman standing two metres from a coughing man without a mask will be exposed to 10,000 times more large droplets than if he were wearing one, even if he is only 50 centimetres away, researchers reported in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
The study focused on particles larger than 170 microns in diameter, which are understood to be the main driver of SARS-CoV-2 transmission.
“There is no more doubt whatsoever that face masks can dramatically reduce the dispersion of potentially virus-laden droplets,” senior author Ignazio Maria Viola, an expert in applied fluid dynamics at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Engineering, told AFP.
According to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) in Seattle, Washington, 55,000 lives could be saved in the United States over the next four months if a policy of universal mask use were adopted.
The WHO updated its Covid-19 guidance to recommend masks be worn indoors in the presence of other people if ventilation is inadequate earlier this month.
Regulators have cleared rapid-result Covid-19 tests for use at home but set strict conditions on how they are to be deployed, it has been reported.
Boris Johnson’s hopes of avoiding months-long lockdowns rest in part on regulators approving lateral flow devices (LFDs) for wider use.
The Times revealed on Saturday that the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) was blocking a plan to post tens of millions of tests to households.
The MHRA has now approved the tests, which give results in 30 minutes, for use at home by members of the public, according to the Financial Times.
However, it says the regulator has placed strict conditions on their use, which may severely limit their application as an alternative to social distancing measures.
“The MHRA is keen to emphasise, however, that the devices are allowed to be used only to ‘find’ cases of Covid-19 infections, so that people who were not aware they had the virus are able to isolate,” the FT reported. “They are not to be used to ‘enable’ people to make life decisions.”
Tens of millions of LFDs are being kept in warehouses in the UK at present and hundreds of millions more are on order.
They have been put forward by ministers variously as a way of helping regions come out of tougher lockdowns, enabling relatives to visit care home residents and most recently allowing schools to open on time in January.
There is fierce debate about whether they offer an appropriate level of confidence to make decisions about behaviour, however.
Initial evaluation of the lateral flow tests by the University of Oxford was positive, finding that they picked up 77 per cent of cases, rising to over 90 per cent of the most infectious.
However, accuracy fell from 79 per cent when used by laboratory scientists to 58 per cent when used by ordinary people without training, while real-world testing in Liverpool found the tests picked up only 49 per cent of cases.
The Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies concluded this month that “lateral flow testing should not be seen as a way on its own of enabling high-risk activities to take place but could reduce the risk of activities that are due to occur anyway”, according to minutes released yesterday.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/home-flow-tests-cleared-but-come-with-warning-853vmqp7x