The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
The parent company of Hudson Bay Mining and Smelting is mulling over offers from various companies interested in purchasing the Flin Flon operation. New details of the potential sale by Anglo American were publicized yesterday, though Peter Jones, president and CEO of HBMS, disclosed neither the size of the offers nor which companies are making them. "If they do sell it, what they're trying to do is sell it as a going concern," said Jones at yesterday's Healthy Flin Flon forum at the Friendship Centre. "In other words, they're not actually selling the company, they're selling a company that owns this company." If Anglo does agree to a sale in the near future, he said, the process would likely not be concluded until the end of this year. Jones stressed that "there's no decision in place at this time" and that the "plan is not to chop it up or to do anything strange, it's to just sell it the way it is." He further emphasized that if HBMS does not ultimately change hands, Anglo does not expect to close HBMS. The United Kingdom-based parent company wants to sell the mining and smelting operation because "they believe that Hudson Bay is not a good fit into the Anglo base metals portfolio," Jones said. "That's for a number of reasons that I won't go into," he said, "but fundamentally, they feel they want to take their money and invest it in other base metal operations." The timing is right for Anglo, as the new 777 projects at HBMS are complete and base metal prices "have been fairly buoyant this past year," Jones noted. Anglo began evaluating its Flin Flon operation earlier this year with a view toward a potential sale. Tom Goodman, vice-president of Technical Services and Human Resources for HBMS, said in May that Anglo has a "high standard as a corporate citizen" and would ensure that HBMS, if sold, would go to "a responsible buyer."
