must answer for itself as the global mining industry enters a new round of upheaval, driven by the lunge for metals critical to a low-carbon future.No one knows, and there are enormous risks in both playing the mergers and acquisitions game and avoiding it. Rio knows it needs more copper – it is ranked a lowly eighth in terms of production.
The question is whether Rio will be forced to break from character and pursue ambitious M&A to vault it to the forefront of the critical minerals race, or watch the likes of BHP, Anglo, Glencore and, to a lesser extent, Canada’s Teck Resources, occupy the lead positions. And he is fit. We started the interview like no interview I had done before. From social media, he learned that I am a cyclist and suggested we meet at 7 a.m. in front of his carriage house in Mayfair, one of London’s poshest neighbourhoods, for a prebreakfast pedalling session. We MAMILs – middle-aged men in Lycra – blasted through Mayfair and Knightsbridge on our expensive racing machines on the way to Richmond Park, where we did two 11-kilometre loops.
Mr. Stausholm and his wife, Charlotte, own houses in London, Copenhagen and Majorca, the Spanish island in the Mediterranean known as a cyclist’s haven. They have three grown children. Their Mayfair house is no palace and is simply furnished. His Trek racing bike shows its age. In 2023, his total compensation came to £8.4-million, fairly modest by supersized company standards on either side of the Atlantic. He owns fewer than 100,000 of Rio’s 1.6 billion shares.
After our ride, at a café directly across from his house, Mr. Stausholm downed egg-topped avocado toast, orange juice and a “skinny milk” cappuccino. Copper – the hot metal of the moment – seems the one commodity Rio could use more of. The question is whether organic growth alone will drive it into the copper big leagues, or whether Rio will have to seek a shape-changing merger, takeover or restructuring to get there. Two of the biggest takeover efforts in the mining world since last year, Glencore for Teck and BHP for Anglo, were largely copper lunges .