Shock and ore: the fight for the world’s mineral riches

Marius Kloppers is a man who has clearly learnt that business is like warfare in at least one respect: if you’re planning an attack, it might as well be done quickly. On 1 October this year, the 45-year-old South African was installed as chief executive of the Australian mining conglomerate BHP Billiton. Within less than a month, he’d pressed the button on an audacious £67 billion bid for BHP’s mighty British-based rival Rio Tinto. The prize: a £170 billion conglomerate that would be far and away the world leader in its sector, with mines everywhere from Brazil to Australia and control of vast reserves of mineral riches.

If successful, the deal would be the biggest takeover of all time, eclipsing the $124 billion marriage of Time-Warner and AOL at the height of the dotcom boom. Already Rio Tinto has rejected the proposal, and is planning its fightback. The City is swirling with colourful rumours, including a potential counter-bid for BHP: the so-called Pac-Man defence, after the long forgotten (and slightly ropey) computer game that was around when the tactic of morphing from prey into predator was first fashioned in the epic takeover battles of the 1980s. But amid the inevitable noise and smoke that grows up around any takeover, with armies of bankers, PR consultants and hedge-fund arbitrageurs settling in for a long and lucrative siege, two more interesting themes are also emerging.

Kloppers, whether wittingly or not, has blown the starting whistle on the next great bull market. And he has opened the door on what may well prove to be one of the key economic conflicts of the coming decade: the battle for control of increasingly expensive natural resources between the people who own them and the people who use them to make stuff. It’s quite likely that the main opposition to this bid will come not from Rio’s shareholders — whose only real ground for complaint is not being offered a rich enough price — but from the Chinese and other emerging-market powerhouses, worrying about the old economies regaining an advantage over the new by charging them more and more for the raw materials they need to feed their factories.