MELBOURNE, Australia — BHP has formally pulled the plug on its latest effort to acquire rival Anglo American, announcing on Monday that it would not proceed with a bid just days before a crucial shareholder vote on an Anglo deal to combine with Teck Resources. The mining group said Anglo’s copper assets were attractive, but its own organic growth portfolio now provides a more compelling long-term route to value for shareholders, Nov. 24, 2025.
BHP announced the decision with a short statement to the Australian Securities Exchange, conceding it had “walked away from a last ridiculous attempt” to approach Anglo’s board some two weeks before that company’s shareholder vote on Dec. 9,2025, according to a detailed Reuters report.
The maneuver comes after two days of reports that the group had made a largely stock proposal last week, which Anglo spurned just as quickly, leaving barely enough time to renegotiate before City takeover rules required a cooling-off period. British coverage in the Guardian reported that BHP had told investors it was “no longer pursuing a combination of the two companies” and would focus on its own portfolio, while ushering in a six-month waiting period for new bids.
The latest withdrawal is reminiscent of BHP’s abandoned $49 billion bid for Anglo in 2024, which it walked away from after the board turned down a third and “final” offer conditional on selling its platinum and iron ore units in South Africa, as described in a Reuters reconstruction here.
Anglo rejected three offers at the time, which valued the group at as much as £38.6 billion, and said the offer’s structure was “highly complex and unattractive,” according to contemporaneous reporting in The Guardian.
Under that pressure, Anglo hastened a far-reaching overhaul in May 2024 to simplify its portfolio, concentrate on copper, premium iron ore, and crop nutrients, and deliver at least $ 800 million in annual cost cuts by the end of 2025, according to an update to its strategy.
Those shifts came to a head in the proposed Anglo-Teck tie-up, an all-share merger valued at roughly $50 billion, announced in September, that will create an entity called Anglo Teck, whose focus is copper, and that has its primary listing in London but is based in Canada. According to the proposed deal, Anglo’s shareholders would hold roughly 62% of the new company, and Teck’s shareholders would hold 38%; both are scheduled to vote on Dec. 9, 2025.
For BHP, this new phase begins with its center of gravity already shifted toward copper. The company’s full-year 2025 results show it delivered record production of more than 2m tonnes of copper – about 28% more than three years ago – along with US$26bn in underlying EBITDA and US$10.2bn in underlying profit.
Management’s case is that copper will be the metal of the energy transition, a view supported by its own analysis, which predicts global demand will increase by around 70% out to 2050 due to electrification, electric vehicles, and data centres, as outlined in the company’s updated copper demand outlook.
That long-term thesis is the foundation of its decision to push a heavier focus on projects it already owns and trusts, while pledging to cut operational greenhouse gas emissions by at least 30% compared with 2020 levels by 2030 and achieve net-zero by 2050 under its enhanced Climate Transition Action Plan, which won significant shareholder backing in 2024.
BHP has told investors it anticipates about 70% of its medium-term capital investment will be in copper and potash, with significant work already underway at Chilean assets, including Escondida and Spence, as well as the Jansen potash project in Canada. Recent filings and a July Reuters update also highlighted cost overruns and a schedule slip at Jansen, with first production now scheduled for mid-2027.
Independent analysis has pointed out that the company’s copper plans seem increasingly focused on organic opportunities across four focus areas in Chile, Australia, Argentina, and the US, rather than on mega-transformative takeovers, as revealed in a 2025 review by investment research site Discovery Alert.
By bowing out now, the miner also lessens his potential liability should the Anglo-Teck vote go south. Analysts quoted by Reuters said its retreat reduces interloper risk around the deal and increases the chances that the merger will go ahead, albeit with a potential reopening of the offer once UK takeover restrictions lapse in six months.
For the time being, investors seem happy with that trade-off. Anglo shares rose on news of the aborted approach, while the mining group’s stock climbed slightly, a sign investors believe it can deliver disciplined, copper-led growth without overpaying for scale. The Dec. 9 Anglo-Teck vote will be the next big test of whether that wager pays off.
