BHP and Billiton join to make a world beater

By Susan Bell The merger of BHP and Billiton will turn two great pretenders into a potentially wo...

By Susan Bell The merger of BHP and Billiton will turn two great pretenders into a potentially world beating company. American Paul Anderson took over at BHP in 1998. He inherited a weakened, discredited group groaning under the weight of underperforming assets and a history of spending too much money for too little return. Problem areas included the spectacular underperformance of the US Magma Copper assets, which BHP wildly overpaid for only days before the Sumitomo scandal; the costly, malfunctioning hot briquetted iron plant in Western Australia; and a mineral sands project in Western...