Anglo-American Plc. has experienced a turbulent couple of weeks having caused significant discord between stock analysts, prompting varying upgrades and downgrades of Anglo stocks.
The South African mining company boasts a market cap of £21.943 billion ($34 billion), and has a portfolio ranging from bulk commodities (iron, manganese, metallurgical coal), to base metals (including copper, nickel and niobium) and even precious metals and minerals (including platinum and diamonds).
However, the mining giant had been locked in a ten-month feud with Chilean company Codelco over assets resulting from activities in Chile, which had been drawing significant negative attention from investors and supressing stock prices.
On August 24th, an announcement was made that such differences had been resolved. As such, upgrades in stock prices were anticipated.
Surprisingly, stocks in Anglo-American were nonetheless downgraded by the Jefferies group, from “buy” to “hold”. The Jefferies Group expressed a worry that the large Anglo-American Brazilian iron ore project known as “Minas Rio” would not meet targets to deliver a first shipment of ore by the second half of 2014, thus reducing its attractiveness for investors.
Anglo-American stocks were also subject to mention by analysts AlphaValue. Here, analysts reiterated a rating of “add” in a note to investors, stating a current price target of $34.52 on the stocks.
Now – only a week later -analysts at Exane BNP Paribas have reinstated their grading of Anglo-American stocks to “neutral”; quoting a current stock price target of $35.71 (2250 GBX). This upgrade is closer to what had been initially expected following resolution of the on-going Chilean dispute.
This resulted in Anglo-American shares opening at 1784.00 on Thursday; as compared to its one year low of GBX 1850.50 and a one year high of GBX 2958.00.
Inset: Cynthia Carroll, CEO Anglo American
Image via telegraph
