Glencore seen still hungry after swallowing Xstrata – by Clara Ferreira-Marques (Reuters U.K. – May 2, 2013)

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LONDON, May 2 (Reuters) – After years of on-off talks, months of brinksmanship and often bitter negotiations, Glencore’s head Ivan Glasenberg gets to complete the $30 billion acquisition of Xstrata on Thursday, the mining industry’s biggest takeover yet.

But even as the champagne pops, investors and rivals are asking where the highly ambitious South African will look for his next deal. Many are already pointing to vulnerable or undervalued rivals, including Anglo American.

“This is not the endgame, this is the beginning,” analyst Chris LaFemina at Jefferies said. “Glencore wants to buy when no one else wants to buy, and what no one else wants to buy – that is when no one else is bidding and you can buy things cheap. That time is clearly now.”

Xstrata began just over a decade ago with a collection of zinc and ferroalloy assets and coal mines bought from Glencore, building itself up under now departing chief executive Mick Davis into one of the world’s largest diversified miners.

The combination of commodities trader Glencore and producer Xstrata, long Glasenberg’s ambition, creates a mining and trading powerhouse with over 100 mines around the world, some 130,000 employees, and an oil division with more ships than Britain’s Royal Navy.

It will be the largest exporter of thermal coal and the third-largest producer of mined copper.

But South African-born Glasenberg, who has rattled rivals with forthright comments, such as recently telling them they had “screwed up”, is not done.

“In terms of hunger, ambition, I can’t see any reason why Ivan Glasenberg’s ambition has been diminished as a consequence of this deal. He has a greater awareness of his ability to get deals of this scale done,” said analyst Paul Gait at Sanford Bernstein in London.

Anglo American, one of the most frequently quoted of Glencore’s larger potential targets, has been in team Glasenberg’s sights before. He was a key shareholder when Xstrata made a move for Anglo in 2009, only to be rebuffed.

‘NATURAL BUYER’

Anglo has now set itself on a turnaround path with a new CEO, but is still battling to overcome the impact of overruns at its $8.8 billion Minas-Rio iron ore project in Brazil and an unprecedented squeeze in platinum, where it faces weak prices, high costs and combative unions. Its shares trade at discount to the sum of the parts that some analysts put at 50 percent.

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