Characteristics of global copper M&A and its implications on Chinese mining companies' capacity improvements of securing quality resources

Given the ever growing size of global miners, the M&A(merger and acquisition) as a primary collaborative form of global miners is increasingly becoming a critical instrument to integrate the resources and lead to leapfrog development and sustainability of miners.Based on major transactions over last two decades, analyzed and investigated the number and volume of copper transactions, average copper reserves acquisition cost as well as performance of Chinese miners concurrently.The primary findings set out as follows, due to the scarcity of new major discoveries and challenges of delivering greenfield projects, coupled with unanimously positive outlook of copper commodity in the future, the copper M & A markets could become extremely competitive.Secondly, copper miners should come up with clear acquisition strategy and examine potential opportunities constantly which aligned with its strategy, while the robust human resources and financial resources should be readily prepared prior to the opportunity showing up.Thirdly, in order to create a worldclass Chinese mining corporation with global competitiveness, the comprehensive consolidation of overseas quality coppers assets should be considered to better serve the mineral resources security of China.