By Rudi Filapek-Vandyck<\/p>\n
Is it a case of where smoke is there’s fire or is China playing a game with the hearts and minds of shareholders and management at resources giants BHP Billiton ((BHP)) and Rio Tinto ((RIO))?<\/p>\n
After a previous press report on the basis of unnamed sources revealing that China’s government owned investment funds and steel manufacturers are in the process of putting a counter bid together for Rio Tinto, Chinese media have now followed up with a name to attach to the story.<\/p>\n
According to the latest Chinese press reports on Tuesday, the country’s largest steel producer Baosteel Group is likely to launch a bid for Rio Tinto.<\/p>\n
“We are considering it and the chance of putting forward a bid is very high,” the 21st Century Business Herald quoted Xu Lejiang, chairman of Baosteel.<\/p>\n
Some more detail from the story emerged with the newspaper quoting Lejiang as saying it was important for Baosteel to have its own mines.<\/p>\n
When asked about the price of a possible deal, he apparently responded with “[USD]200 billion is probably not enough.”<\/p>\n
BHP’s current offer values Rio Tinto at approximately US$142bn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
More press reports from China suggest a counter bid for Rio Tinto is a high probability.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[23,27,89,88],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53729"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53729\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}