BHP Billiton has confirmed that it plans to ask shareholders at its UK and Australian annual meetings to remove the word “Billiton” from its name, around 17 years after taking over Billiton Plc and becoming the world’s biggest mining company.
The change is appropriate given BHP’s core assets are those it bought to merger with Billiton – the vastly profitable iron ore assets in WA, coking coal mines in Queensland (with Mitsubishi), oil and gas in Australia, the US and several other regions, copper in Chile and elsewhere in South America and Australia, and a series of smaller investments and exploration assets.
In documents for the two annual meetings next month (https://www.bhp.com/-/media/documents/investors/annual-reports/2018/bhpnoticeofmeetinglimited2018.pdf?la=en) and released on Tuesday to the ASX, the company said it would ask shareholders to vote to rename the company BHP Group as it refocuses on its Australian roots.
That follows the decision in May by BHP to move to a new logo that simply said “BHP” and dropped three stylized blobs that had been featured for years. It also adopted the motto “Think Big” in place of “Resourcing the Future.”
The shortened name takes the company back to its origins as Broken Hill Proprietary Co, when it was formed more than 130 years ago around a silver, lead and tin mine in NSW (at Broken Hill). It formally adopted BHP Ltd in 2000, a year before the 2001 merger with Billiton PLC, when it took on both names and a dual Australia-UK-headquartered dual-listed structure.
In recent years, the company has consolidated its portfolio of assets around iron ore, oil and gas, copper, and coal. In 2015, it spun off the Billiton assets and some of its own operation – nickel, aluminum manganese and thermal and coking coal into South32 Ltd.
Earlier it exited the Australian steel industry via the split and sale of BHP Steel in two companies – what became BlueScope (and based in Wollongong and the US) and Arrium (which is based in Whyalla and which collapsed a couple of years ago but has now been bought by an Indian company).
In late July, it struck a US$10.8 billion deal to exit its shale assets in the US, selling most of the oil and gas operations to BP after losing billions on the play. Shareholders will learn at the annual meetings how that cash will be returned to them.
UK based shareholders in BHP Billiton PLC will be asked to vote on the name change at the annual meeting in October, and shareholders in BHP Billiton will vote at the annual meeting the next month in Adelaide. BHP shares ended down 0.4% at $31.48.
