Anglo American boss sees future in London despite HQ move
Anglo American has no plans to move its primary listing away from London once its megamerger with Canadian rival Teck is completed, its boss has said, despite the firm recently choosing to move its headquarters to Vancouver.
Duncan Wanblad, who will eventually head up the future ‘Anglo Teck’ entity should the deal be green lit by regulators, said it was “not the intention” to shift its main listing away from the Square Mile and that it was instead exploring secondary listings in Vancouver, New York and Johannesburg.
“Right now, London provides a really good source of capital for us, and works quite well for the merged company going forward,” he told the FT Metals and Mining Summit. “So this is where the primary listing is planned to be.”
Last month, Anglo American and Teck – a Vancouver-based group that predominantly mines coal, copper and zinc – unveiled a $53bn merger that amounted to the second-largest mining deal in history.
As part of the announcement, the London-listed firm said it would move its headquarters to Canada’s financial capital, a process that would involve uprooting dozens of staff from the UK office that had been its global hub for decades.
‘Makes an enormous amount of sense’ to be in London – Anglo American CEO
The decision set off another round of fears that London was struggling to retain some of the flagship names from an industry to which the City had long been the natural home.
Earlier this year, Glencore launched a review of its listing, saying its shareholders may have been more likely to get “the right and optimal valuation” elsewhere before shelving those plans in August.
And Rio Tinto remains under pressure from a cohort investors looking to consolidate its shares in Sydney, in a shadowing of BHP’s bombshell decision to do the same in 2022.
Wanblad said that given the “vast majority” of investors in both Anglo and Teck are based in London – and the exchange still grants significant access to capital – retaining its primary listing “makes an enormous amount of sense”. But asked to guarantee that would remain the case long-term, he said: “I’m not making any such pledge, but what I’m telling you is that – today – it makes an enormous amount of sense for us to maintain the primary listing in London, which is what we’ve done.”
The Anglo American boss also sought to brush off accusations that his firm had not looked into Teck thoroughly enough in the months leading up to its merger, after the Canadian group this week cut its copper production forecast at a key Chilean mine by nearly 20 per cent.
“Of course we did an extraordinary amount of due diligence,” he said, adding: “We remain extremely confident that we will deliver those synergies [promised in the deal] and that the value represented in in the merger proposition is is extraordinarily good – not impacted at all by the announcement yesterday.”