F T weekend article24 Mar 2021 09:26
It is telling that Anglo American’s chief executive Mark Cutifani recently stated that the m8ning group will take a measured line on investments, despite recent hype over new commodity supercycles.
As well he might. One of the abiding memories of the last period of record prices was the profligacy of executives from some of the world’s largest resource companies.
Cutifani is clearly not interested in going down that road, even though demand prospects for Anglo’s copper, platinum and diamonds are wholly encouraging. So it is doubtful that we will see a repeat of the imprudent kind of deal making and one-upmanship which sapped strength from the miners’ balance sheets, thereby imperilling their ab8kity to return capital to shareholders.
Yet with all the talk over the coming supercycles, now might be a good time to offload some of your resourc3 holdings. Two of Anglo’s insiders Didier Charreton and Bruce Cleaver, the latter the chief executive of the De Beers subsidiary, did just that, collectively hiving off around £3.3m worth of shares following publication of the mining heavyweight’s full-year figures for 2020. With a potential sizeable increase in production volumes over the next three to five years, we think Anglo is well positioned as anyone to exploit positive pricing trents.
A couple of snippets from the Director deals article, thought it might be of interest to some people.