Good evening,

It’s last-chance saloon season for spurned suitors, who are making a final push to have their deals locked in by Christmas.

Last week it was Brookfield/EIG Partners bringing months of talks to a head with an $18.4 billion offer for Origin Energy, while this week it’s BHP with a revised $9 billion-plus bid for OZ Minerals.

BHP and OZ started talking about a week ago, and by last weekend both sides were confident they were homing in on an offer that would get the Big Australian due diligence and potentially a board recommendation.

After months of slagging each other off, everyone was on the same page. The chairman spoke over the weekend, boards were aligned and lawyers were drafting necessary paperwork.

Come Wednesday morning, and after days of waiting, OZ thought it was getting close to a resolution. The copper miner paused its shares from trading, before we revealed it was back in talks with BHP. It spent the rest of the day in a halt.

BHP’s revised bid is expected to be at $28 to $29 a share, or about 10 per cent higher than its $25 offer in August.

The reality is that no matter what BHP offers now, OZ’s valuation will always ebb and flow with the copper price. So $27 or $28 today may be completely in or out of the money come scheme meeting day (should it get there) in six months.

As a result, and assuming the two companies came to an agreement on Wednesday night, the deal will ride the copper price for months, just as IGO’s bid for Western Areas earlier this year.

Elsewhere in Street Talk, we got our hands on the September 30 lender update at GenesisCare, reveal a huge valuation drop for Macquarie backed BNPL group BizPay and have a shopping centre deal.

Happy reading,
Anthony Macdonald, Sarah Thompson and Kanika Sood
Street Talk editors