I am sort of surprised to see that nobody seems to be talking about a pretty major acquisition that took place yesterday. No. 1 metal service center Reliance Steel & Aluminum Co., announced they intend to acquire No. 10 service center PNA Group from Platinum Equity, a private equity firm. In a deal valued at […]

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It’s nice to be noticed for doing a great job. It’s quite another to take the heat from a CFO demanding cost reduction for steel and related metals products. Purchasing managers and their staffs have been riding a commodity volatility wave for a few years now. But some executives are just noticing the impact that […]

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Imagine this headline: “Rio Tinto Just Found a Whole Load of Copper”. Or this one: “BHP to Swallow Rio Tinto”. Both are real, and both came from Forbes. What’s interesting is the timing of one in conjunction with the second. As has been widely reported, BHP made a hostile takeover bid for Rio Tinto back […]

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Editor’s Note: This is the second of a two part series. The first part appears here
So what can we expect in the years ahead, not so much from ArcelorMittal, Lakshmi Mittal himself is a young man and will no doubt continue on this path as long as the competition authorities will allow him. No I […]

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Editor’s Note: This is the first of a two-part series
I was reading an interesting article the other day in that most informative of publications, the Economist, about the rise Lakshmi Mittal. Mittal has become the world’s fifth richest man worth some $37b principally through his 43% stake in the world’s largest steel maker ArcelorMittal. Mittal […]

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Sorry for the rhyming. I’m in one of those moods…
Buried in the bowels of it’s Sunday edition, the Wall Street Journal had an article on how Rio Tinto Alcan became the subject of an anti-trust investigation filed by the European Commission. According to the article, the EC “charges Alcan with having abused its dominant position […]

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Note: This is part two of a two-part series discussing a recent report from Ernst & Young. Part one offers additional insight and an introduction to the topic.
Inaccurate Analytics
The Ernst & Young report expresses disdain at the accuracy of metals price predictions, noting the disappointing errors of the past few years. The writers suggest that some […]

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BHP Billiton, the world’s leading diversified mining company, tried to win over smaller rival Rio Tinto through a hostile bid last week to create the world’s third-largest corporation, behind Exxon Mobil and General Electric. The proposed corporation would become what Purchasing.com calls “a mining giant worth approximately $400 billion and possibly … the world’s largest iron-ore supplier” — […]

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Before MetalMiner begins our short holiday hiatus, we would like to introduce contributing writer and associate editor Amy Edwards, who plans to write the occasional blurb and even in-depth features articles for MetalMiner. A graduate student at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., Amy looks forward to learning more about the metals industry and sharing that […]

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