Insight - BHP may see another sunny outlook turn to ashes

BHP has already been looking at selling the mines for about a year with no real takers, so new boss Mike Henry is hoping to offer a more tempting product as an incentive

EXECUTIVES’ pronouncements about the future have a nasty habit of coming back to bite their successors a few years down the line.

At annual results in 2009, BHP Group’s then-chief executive officer Marius Kloppers sang the praises of the company’s South African thermal coal business, an asset it was “really pleased to have” which would benefit from rising energy demand from India. Five years later, getting rid of the division through the spinoff of South32 Ltd was one of his successor Andrew Mackenzie’s first duties in the job. (South32 is in turn selling the now money-losing unit).