LONDON, March 25, 2026, 11:44 GMT
Anglo American jumped to 3,171 pence by 11:43 GMT Wednesday, up from a 3,054 pence finish the day before, with mining stocks pacing advances across London. The FTSE 100 tacked on 1.1%, while miners as a group surged 3.4%.
Anglo’s push to wrap up a stock-for-stock merger with Teck Resources would vault the pair into the fifth spot among global copper producers. The metal is crucial—essential in everything from transmission lines to car parts—and has become a core bargaining chip in mining M&A. Reuters has noted that BHP and Rio Tinto are also out looking for more copper.
Oil dropped roughly 5% Wednesday after news broke that Washington delivered a 15-point proposal to Iran, seeking a one-month ceasefire. With crude sliding, worries over inflation relaxed a bit, giving gold and other metals stocks room to rebound from their earlier declines.
Peter Fertig, analyst at Quantitative Commodity Research, pointed out that money markets now signal “the market is expecting that there isn’t a hike of central bank interest rates.” That change has been critical for mining stocks, with concerns over higher rates having weighed on metals lately. Reuters
This week, Anglo rolled out another update for investors. On Monday, the company announced plans to delist from the SIX Swiss Exchange as of June 26—timing it just before wrapping up the Teck acquisition. London stays as the main listing, while secondary listings are on the table for Johannesburg, Toronto, and New York after the merger, pending approvals.
The schedule hasn’t slipped. Anglo’s Brazil chief Ana Sanches last week told reporters the miner is still looking for final regulatory sign-off “around the year-end,” so attention shifts again to pulling it off. Reuters
Copper is still commanding the spotlight. This week, Freeport-McMoRan CEO Kathleen Quirk told Reuters that “the things that are driving copper demand are more secular in nature,” meaning the demand looks set to stick around—even after the Iran conflict rattled markets. That perspective has kept investor attention on copper stocks, commodity volatility notwithstanding. Reuters
Operational headaches linger for Anglo. Back in February, the miner trimmed its 2026 copper target, dropping guidance to 700,000-760,000 tons from the earlier 760,000-820,000, blaming weaker production at Collahuasi in Chile. Still, Anglo kept pushing its strategy to streamline—looking to divest or spin off De Beers, steelmaking coal, and nickel, aiming for a tighter focus on copper and iron ore.
The rally’s messy. Tehran says there are no talks with Washington, which leaves oil vulnerable to another spike—fuel for fresh inflation jitters. Anglo isn’t in the clear either: it’s stuck with trimmed copper forecasts, plus a slumping diamond business after De Beers’ $2.3 billion write-down dragged results to a $3.7 billion loss in February.
