Message aimed at Chinese

摘要

Just days before the CHINA MINING conference, CITIC Hong Kong (Holdings) Ltd chairman and managing director Larry Yung announced he had bought 17 million shares in the publicly listed mining giant Anglo American. The 800 million US dollars purchase was made via Yung's China Vision Resources Ltd and raised much speculation in the media that the transaction was going to act as a platform for one of the first serious Chinese forays into the African minerals sector. It was something of a prophetic event, given the buzz phrase circulating around the three day Beijing forum was "mergers and acquisitions". However, when Anglo American's chairman Sir Mark Moody-Stuart took to the podium on the second morning of the international chinwag, industry consolidation seemed to be the furthest thing from his mind as he spoke about sustainable development and some of the lessons learnt by the mining sector from past mistakes.