Miners are engaging in plenty of takeover talks despite a tepid year for acquisitions, but few deals will get done without greater clarity on the economy and an ebbing of Covid-19, said the industry’s top dealmaker.
“There’s lots of conversations going on, lots of people exploring new ways to think and new ways to operate,” Dan Barclay, who heads Bank of Montreal’s capital-markets division, said in an interview last week. “The probability of a lot of action is going to be conditional on that economic recovery.”
For years, mining executives including Barrick Gold Corp.’s Mark Bristow have been saying that consolidation in the industry is inevitable given the abundance of companies and increasing difficulty of finding new high-grade deposits.
That could be a boon for investment banks including BMO Capital Markets, among the most active dealmakers in mining and the No. 1 adviser for acquisitions last year.
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