BHP May See Another Sunny Outlook Turn to Ashes
The mining giant’s optimism on coking coal rests on the questionable longevity of steelmaking blast furnaces.
Blast furnaces may be on the way out sooner than BHP thinks.
Photographer: Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg
Executives’ pronouncements about the future have a nasty habit of coming back to bite their successors a few years down the line.
At annual results in 2009, BHP Group's then-Chief Executive Officer Marius Kloppers sang the praises of the company’s South African thermal coal business, an asset it was “really pleased to have” which would benefit from rising energy demand from India. Five years later, getting rid of the division through the spinoff of South32 Ltd. was one of his successor Andrew Mackenzie’s first duties in the job. (South32 is in turn selling the now money-losing unit).