The market is primed after Aston Resources founder Nathan Tinkler successfully sold 10% of the Maules Creek coal project in NSW to Japanese electricity wholesaling group J-Power in October for $370 million – effectively a 20% premium to Aston’s current share price.
Queensland Coal Company, which is owned by Brisbane-based Paul Williams, has placed its Wilton coking coal project in a company called Coal of Queensland, which has been valued at about $500 million and is expected to launch an initial public offering in the first half of next year.
QCC is one of the largest private holders of coal tenements in Queensland and owns a portfolio of coking, PCI and thermal coal assets throughout the Bowen, Surat, Galilee and Clarence-Moreton basins.
Williams has over 40 years business experience in mining including as a rig owner and operator. He has also developed multiple quarries, owning and operating more than 20 rigs, according to the company’s website.
Wilton, which lies near Ensham Resources’ mines in the Bowen Basin, has JORC compliant resources of 500 million tonnes of coal and an exploration target of up to 2.6Bt, which could be mined by a combination of underground and open cut mining methods.
As part of its $3.1 billion takeover of Felix Resources in 2009, Yanzhou had undertaken to list a portion of its Australian Yancoal assets on the ASX by 2012.
The company would sell approximately a third of Yancoal, through an initial public offering, according to Bloomberg. Yancoal investor relations manager Ian McAleese said it had a “strategy to be IPO-ready by the end of 2011”
“We would like to have our prospectus ready to be able to take advantage of market conditions,” he told Bloomberg.
“The preferred way to do this is to sell more stock than 30 per cent of the total value.”
Yancoal operates four mines in Australia and reported a net income of $415 million last year.
It has purchased a string of Australian companies since its Felix purchase in 2009 including coal developer Syntech Resources for $202.5 million.
In October this year Yancoal announced the purchase of Wesfarmers’ Premier coal mine in Western Australia for $296.8 million but its managing director Murray Bailey said coal purchases would not stop there.
