ArcelorMittal, the largest producer of steel, raised its cash offer for Baffinland Iron Mines Corp to C$1.25 (US$1.23) a share and said the target company’s board supports the increased price.
The offer for all of Baffinland’s shares and all of its 2007 warrants would make the deal worth more than C$492 million, Daniella Dimitrov, Baffinland vice chairman, wrote in an e-mail. The bid has been extended until 11:59pm Toronto time on Dec. 29 and represents a 14 percent premium on the original bid, Luxembourg-based ArcelorMittal said in a statement on Saturday. Warrant holders will get C$0.10 per warrant, Baffinland said.
The minimum acceptance condition for the purchase has been lowered to 50 percent plus one common share, Arcelor said. About 25 percent of Baffinland’s stock has been tendered.
ArcelorMittal aims to boost self-sufficiency in raw materials as prices for iron ore and coking coal surge on demand from China. The company said in September it planned to spend US$4 billion to increase iron-ore production to 100 million tonnes a year by 2015, from 60 million.
On Thursday, Nunavut Iron Ore Acquisition Inc raised its offer to C$1.35 a share for 50.1 percent of Toronto-based Baffinland, compared with ArcelorMittal’s Nov. 8 price of C$1.10 a share for the whole company. Toronto-based Nunavut previously made an offer of C$0.80.
“We believe our offer is clearly superior to Nunavut Iron’s partial and incomplete offer because it does not expose the remaining shareholders with financing risk for the project and potential dilution to their investment,” Peter Kukielski, Arcelor’s head of mining said in the statement.
Baffinland’s Mary River project contains reserves of 365 million tonnes of iron ore, ArcelorMittal said in a statement last month. Prices for iron ore, a key steelmaking ingredient, almost doubled in the April quarter and gained more than 20 percent in the June-to-September period.
Baffinland rose C$0.04, or 3.1 percent, to C$1.32 in Toronto Stock Exchange trading on Friday. The shares have more than doubled this year.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by