FMG.AX - Fortescue Metals Group Limited
| Previous close | 14.60 |
| Open | 14.36 |
| Bid | 18.23 x 0 |
| Ask | 14.57 x 0 |
| Day's range | 14.26 - 14.61 |
| 52-week range | 6.59 - 14.96 |
| Volume | 8,993,343 |
| Avg. volume | 16,087,321 |
| Market cap | 44.768B |
| Beta (5Y monthly) | 1.17 |
| PE ratio (TTM) | 14.13 |
| EPS (TTM) | 1.03 |
| Earnings date | 20 Feb 2020 |
| Forward dividend & yield | 1.00 (6.82%) |
| Ex-dividend date | 02 Mar 2020 |
| 1y target est | 3.43 |
- Zacks
Iron-Ore Prices Surge on Impending Demand-Supply Imbalance
Iron-ore prices are riding high on increased demand from China and fears of supply disruption as coronavirus cases spike in Brazil.
- Financial Times
Australian court rules against Fortescue in indigenous rights case
Australia’s top court dismissed an appeal by Fortescue Metals Group against a landmark ruling on indigenous land rights, which could expose the company to hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation claims and set a precedent for other similar cases. The High Court decision on Friday brought to an end a long-running legal battle by the Yindjibarndi people to win recognition for their exclusive native title rights to land in Western Australia on which FMG’s Solomon iron ore mine is located. The Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corporation, a group that represents indigenous people, can now seek compensation for economic loss and “spiritual harm” related to the mine, which is estimated to contain iron ore worth up to A$280bn (US$186bn).
- Zacks
The Zacks Industry Rank Highlights: Fortescue Metals and Vale
The Zacks Industry Rank Highlights: Fortescue Metals and Vale
- Simply Wall St.
Is Fortescue Metals Group Limited's (ASX:FMG) Latest Stock Performance A Reflection Of Its Financial Health?
Fortescue Metals Group's's (ASX:FMG) stock is up by a considerable 20% over the past three months. Given that the...
- Simply Wall St.
Shareholders of Fortescue Metals Group (ASX:FMG) Must Be Delighted With Their 596% Total Return
Buying shares in the best businesses can build meaningful wealth for you and your family. While not every stock...
- Simply Wall St.
A Rising Share Price Has Us Looking Closely At Fortescue Metals Group Limited's (ASX:FMG) P/E Ratio
Fortescue Metals Group (ASX:FMG) shares have had a really impressive month, gaining 31%, after some slippage. And the...
- Simply Wall St.
With EPS Growth And More, Fortescue Metals Group (ASX:FMG) Is Interesting
For beginners, it can seem like a good idea (and an exciting prospect) to buy a company that tells a good story to...
- Bloomberg
Countdown to Zero Challenges Big Polluters
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Oil majors and big miners have been falling over themselves to promise better behavior when it comes to greenhouse gases. A significant number now say they are targeting zero emissions. Unfortunately, not everyone agrees on exactly what that means. It leaves investors clear on good intentions, but far less so on how to price transition risk, compare strategies and judge success.The real trouble sits with the widest and most significant category of emissions — those that don’t come directly from operating a well or mine, but are produced indirectly when oil, gas, iron ore or coal is burned or processed by customers. For outfits like BP Plc and BHP Group, these so-called Scope 3 emissions can add up to as much as 90% of their total footprint. They’re also far harder to control, as they aren’t produced by the reporting companies themselves.Resources giants, even poorly performing oil majors, have the scale and financial clout to manage a transition to a carbon-light economy — should they choose to. The rapid destruction of value in segments of the coal sector has left few in doubt of how quickly they could be left behind if they ignore such downstream emissions. This week's collapse in oil prices is another memento mori for carbon-intensive businesses.That doesn’t mean everyone has embraced the idea of targeting Scope 3 emissions. Rio Tinto Group, for one, has said it can’t set targets for its clients, though it will engage in as yet unspecified projects with the likes of China Baowu Steel Group Corp. BHP will produce numbers later this year. Others, like BP, have promised to eliminate Scope 3 emissions where they’ve drilled the oil, but won’t commit to doing the same if they’re only doing the refining. Spain’s Repsol SA is among the few to be promising an absolute zero target for all three sets of emissions.In this flurry of green activity, what should investors be demanding?The first thing should be transparency. Many of the biggest emitters have yet to make full Scope 3 disclosures, including such pillars of developed-market stock indexes as Exxon Mobil Corp., Anglo American Plc, and Fortescue Metals Group Ltd. At this point, that decision is almost churlish: It isn’t hard for investors to do their own calculations. Those that don’t face up to the reality of decarbonization will increasingly be treated like any other business that’s careless about its medium- and long-term liabilities.A second point is comparability. Although the overwhelming majority of Scope 3 emissions for resources companies come from the processing and combustion of their products, the standard incorporates a range of other activities such as waste disposal, product distribution, and even business travel and staff commuting.To add to that complexity, companies can replace the standardized emissions factors used to produce the figures with bespoke ones if their customers operate particularly efficient plants. Without full transparency about where those savings come in, companies could reduce their footprint by leaning on overly generous assumptions, and claim credit that more rigorous competitors would miss out on.There is also the unsolved question of how to manage double-counting, when, for example, coking coal and iron ore are sold to a producer that will use both in making steel.Investors should demand the means to measure progress, and success. Laying out ambitions for emissions 30 years hence is all but meaningless unless you’re also describing a path to get there. If investors are to take these numbers seriously, they’ll want to see plans for the steps along the way.That won’t be easy. For oil majors, it will require nothing less than a reinvention of their entire businesses, moving into industries that have historically produced lower returns than fossil fuels, as former BP Chief Executive Officer Bob Dudley has pointed out.Mining giants that have depended on revenues from high-volume bulk commodities such as coal and iron ore will have to either push their customers to switch to new technologies such as hydrogen-reduced steel, or depend on less lucrative base metals, specialty commodities and agricultural inputs.Providing too much detail about the road ahead risks disclosing a company’s business strategy, too, or tilting the market. How much of the reductions will come, as with Glencore Plc, from allowing mines and wells to deplete naturally as their reserve base is used up? How much will depend on selling assets, such as BP’s near-20% stake in Rosneft? How much will rely on technology that exists, but is not yet used on a wide scale, like carbon capture and storage?The last point on fund manager wish lists should be consistency. Investors will benchmark talk of long-term ambitions against performance on actual, shorter-term activity.Gabriel Wilson-Otto, head of stewardship, Asia Pacific, at BNP Paribas Asset Management, suggests that will mean keeping an eye on capital spending: Projects that generate downstream emissions decades into the future should be attracting more scrutiny. Similarly, corporate lobbying will be monitored for evidence it is allowing organisations to flash up green ambitions but still campaign against action on climate.None of this should be a burden on good governance. The CDP, a nonprofit research group that pushes for greenhouse disclosure, found in 2014 that the return on investment for companies that do so was 67% higher than for those that didn’t.The winds of decarbonization are blowing through the commodities industry. Companies that don’t bend in the face of these changes will break. To contact the authors of this story: Clara Ferreira Marques at cferreirama@bloomberg.netDavid Fickling at dfickling@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Matthew Brooker at mbrooker1@bloomberg.netThis column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.Clara Ferreira Marques is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering commodities and environmental, social and governance issues. Previously, she was an associate editor for Reuters Breakingviews, and editor and correspondent for Reuters in Singapore, India, the U.K., Italy and Russia.David Fickling is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering commodities, as well as industrial and consumer companies. He has been a reporter for Bloomberg News, Dow Jones, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and the Guardian.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinionSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
- Bloomberg
China Gives Global Miners an African Headache
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- China is poised to let some of its biggest state-owned entities help develop a giant West African iron-ore deposit that’s been tantalizingly promising and painfully problematic for two decades. Whatever happens next, this watershed moment for the steelmaking commodity is bad news for big producers, particularly Rio Tinto Group.The State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission is actively pushing forward with the Simandou mine in Guinea, Bloomberg News reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. The project may cost more than $20 billion.Simandou, tucked away in the south of Guinea, has near-mythical status in the industry, having been coveted by everyone from Ivan Glasenberg of Glencore Plc to Andrew Forrest of Fortescue Metals Group Ltd. and the late Roger Agnelli, former head of Vale SA. After 2007 and 2008, when Rio Tinto used Simandou’s promise to ward off BHP Group’s advances, it was heralded as the project that would open up a new, high-quality iron ore frontier in West Africa to rival Australia’s Pilbara. Instead, it’s been caught in years of expropriation rows, corruption investigations and political disputes. Not a ton has been dug up.A lot is still unclear about what Beijing’s blessing would mean in practice for the deposit, divided into four blocks. The first two were handed last year to SMB-Winning, a consortium backed by Chinese and Singaporean companies, while blocks 3 and 4 are held by Rio Tinto and Aluminum Corp. of China, known as Chinalco. In all likelihood, it will involve financing and practical support for the project’s logistics, the lion’s share of the total cost because of its complexity: 650 kilometers (404 miles) of railway, plus tunnels, roads and a port.Approval would be a significant bet on iron ore, and in some ways, a surprising one. Simandou is at least five or six years away from producing anything. It will miss the bulk of China’s latest infrastructure splurge and could well collide with slowing steel demand. Indeed, in 2018, Chinalco passed on the opportunity to buy Rio’s stake.Two years is a long time in commodities markets, though. China, squeezed by the trade war, has put the focus back on self-reliance for key commodities, and even half of Simandou’s deposit could deliver more than 100 million metric tons a year of high-quality ore, roughly 10% of Beijing’s annual imports. That would help buffer China against events such as a supply squeeze in 2019 caused by a disaster at a Vale dam in Brazil, which drove up iron-ore prices. For China, whose seaborne imports total more than 1 billion tons a year, that output crunch may have added roughly $20 billion or more of extra expenses, not far off the cost of Guinean infrastructure.All of this is a headache for the handful of miners that dominate iron ore production, none more so than Rio. It isn’t as if Pilbara will cease to be profitable. Brazil, with higher freight costs, looks more vulnerable on that front.But China’s newfound enthusiasm for Guinea, if confirmed, leaves Rio in an unwelcome quandary: It can’t ignore a project that could flood the market, especially with the high-quality ore that steel producers increasingly favor. Joining in might give it some control over timing, and the ability to blend Simandou ore with its existing output. Yet it will struggle to convince investors, who can see the miner’s technical and political struggles in Mongolia, and recall that it is still involved in an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice over corruption allegations in Guinea.Then there's the risk that enthusiasm for West Africa could help secure funding for smaller projects, or prompt those already looking at the region, like Fortescue, to invest in destructive volumes.Simandou is still years away at best, and its complex logistics have defeated earlier pretenders. Yet China’s track record in digging up Guinean bauxite suggests it can be done. If nothing else, Beijing has sounded an iron ore warning. To contact the author of this story: Clara Ferreira Marques at cferreirama@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Matthew Brooker at mbrooker1@bloomberg.netThis column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.Clara Ferreira Marques is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering commodities and environmental, social and governance issues. Previously, she was an associate editor for Reuters Breakingviews, and editor and correspondent for Reuters in Singapore, India, the U.K., Italy and Russia.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinionSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
- Simply Wall St.
The Founder & Chairman of the Board of Fortescue Metals Group Limited (ASX:FMG), John Andrew Forrest, Just Bought 122% More Shares
Those following along with Fortescue Metals Group Limited (ASX:FMG) will no doubt be intrigued by the recent purchase...
- Simply Wall St.
Should You Buy Fortescue Metals Group Limited (ASX:FMG) For Its Upcoming Dividend In 4 Days?
Fortescue Metals Group Limited (ASX:FMG) is about to trade ex-dividend in the next 4 days. Ex-dividend means that...
- Bloomberg
How an Iron-Ore Billionaire Escapes ESG Scrutiny
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Australia’s richest man Andrew Forrest cherishes his reputation as one of the good guys. That makes his intimate involvement in one of the world’s most polluting industries a problem.The founder of the world’s fourth-biggest iron-ore miner Fortescue Metals Group Ltd. has done spectacularly well from riding the Chinese steel boom of the past two decades. Net income at Fortescue increased nearly fourfold to $2.45 billion in the first half of the year, the company said Wednesday, delivering A$828 million ($554 million) of interim dividends to Forrest and Minderoo Group Pty., which he controls. The financial bonanza has been blessedly free of the scrutiny that ESG-focused investors such as BlackRock Inc. and Norges Bank Investment Management have devoted to thermal coal in recent months.That's rather remarkable. For all the attention on thermal coal, producing a metric ton of steel in a blast furnace releases almost as much carbon as burning a ton of coal for energy. Globally, the steel industry accounts for about 2.8 billion metric tons of annual emissions, compared to 10.1 billion tons for thermal coal. The world’s major iron ore producers are responsible for some of the largest volumes of end-use emissions globally, equivalent to those of the very biggest independent oil companies.While Fortescue doesn’t disclose such Scope 3 emissions (unusual for a company that values its reputation for responsible business practices), a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests it accounts for around 250 million tons of carbon pollution each year. That puts the company somewhere between Rosneft Oil Co. and Glencore Plc. The 35% stake held by Forrest and Minderoo equates to annual emissions similar to those from the entire country of Bangladesh.How have steelmakers and iron miners evaded the attention of climate-focused investors? A large part of the explanation may be the perception that there’s no alternative to carbon-intensive blast furnaces to provide the world’s steel needs, rendering measures to reduce this emissions burden futile. That’s increasingly not the case, though. Electric arc furnaces making recycled metal from scrap have swept through the U.S. steel industry in recent decades to push dirtier blast furnaces aside. The same technology can be adapted to make non-recycled steel, too, and using hydrogen to burn off the oxygen from iron ore can potentially almost entirely decarbonize the steelmaking process.Swedish steelmaker SSAB AB this month announced plans with miner LKAB AB and utility Vattenfall AB to develop just such a fossil-free steel plant. While the product would cost 20% to 30% more than traditional blast furnace steel, it would be competitive at a carbon price of 40 euros ($43) to 60 euros a metric ton, according to a 2018 study — not that much more than current prices of around 25 euros in Europe’s carbon market. That would look still more attractive if falling prices for renewable electricity and hydrogen, plus wider deployment of electric furnaces, further drove down costs.Forrest is in a unique situation to push miners, steelmakers and governments to accelerate this transition. Unlike the boards and management of BHP Group, Rio Tinto Group and Vale SA, he’s the founder and chairman of his company and has a dominant shareholding.Forrest has made similar stands in the past. When he found at least 12 suppliers employing forced labor — an obvious conflict with his campaign against modern slavery — he promised to drum them out of business if they didn’t change.To date, that same principled approach hasn’t extended to the role that Fortescue and its customers play in climate change. Despite donating A$70 million to aid recovery from the bushfires which have swept Australia in recent months, he’s vacillated between citing the role of global warming in the disaster, repeating bogus claims that arson played the “biggest part” in the fires, and making questionable arguments around reducing forest litter.Pressed repeatedly in an interview with CNN last month to clarify what more he could be doing, he denied, implausibly, that the mining industry had “lobbied hard” against climate policies and said that “the science has to be done” on how to mitigate the fires. In a subsequent article for the Sydney Morning Herald, Forrest said that climate change is real and is intensifying natural disasters.Fortescue is unusually well-placed to benefit from any shift in the steelmaking industry toward a lower-carbon route. The big loser from a move away from blast furnaces would be coking coal — but unlike BHP and Vale, Fortescue doesn’t produce any. Its iron ore is of lower quality than its larger competitors, so would have most to gain from being upgraded to the iron briquettes that would be consumed by electric primary steel mills. Forrest has invested A$20 million to develop hydrogen export capacity for Australia. Using that gas for upgrading ore would represent a much better use of the technology.The risk for iron ore miners like Fortescue is that they’re betting everything on the odds that blast furnaces continue to dominate global steel production. With demand approaching a plateau, a glut of Chinese scrap looming, and rising attention on industrial carbon emissions, that’s no longer such a sure thing. A decade ago, miners were similarly full of confidence that wind and solar power could never supplant the role of thermal coal in electricity generation. How did that prediction turn out? (Corrects the second paragraph of column first published Feb. 19 to show that Minderoo Group Pty. is the entity that receives dividends; clarifies Forrest’s position on climate change in the 12th paragraph.)To contact the author of this story: David Fickling at dfickling@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Rachel Rosenthal at rrosenthal21@bloomberg.netThis column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.David Fickling is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering commodities, as well as industrial and consumer companies. He has been a reporter for Bloomberg News, Dow Jones, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and the Guardian.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinionSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
- Simply Wall St.
Are Fortescue Metals Group Limited’s (ASX:FMG) High Returns Really That Great?
Today we'll look at Fortescue Metals Group Limited (ASX:FMG) and reflect on its potential as an investment. To be...
- Bloomberg
The Coronavirus Won’t Wreck the Commodities Market
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- A rampaging epidemic in the country that consumes about half of the world’s metals has to be bad news for mining stocks, right?Investors are certainly making that bet. The week started with the Bloomberg World Mining Index falling the most in nearly six months, and a six-day losing streak continued Tuesday on expectations that a slowdown in economic activity will cut China’s voracious appetite for commodities.Australian shares of Rio Tinto Group fell as much as 5.9% when trading resumed after a public holiday Monday, on track for their biggest slide in three-and-a-half years. Those of iron-ore producer Fortescue Metals Group Ltd. slumped as much as 8.7% in early trading.That looks overdone. In the grip of an epidemic, it can feel like the sky is falling — but most such viruses die down in a matter of months, and people shouldn’t underestimate how much industrial stimulus Beijing will inject in the economy to keep growth on-target in the aftermath.Consider Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, which swept through southern China and east Asia in the early months of 2003. Like most coronaviruses — and indeed, most infections of the nose and throat, such as influenza — it exhibited a pronounced winter seasonality, with infections beginning in November and dropping rapidly through April, before approaching zero in June.Even Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, a coronavirus associated with parts of the world where winter weather is less extreme, showed a relatively similar pattern, with a peak in the early months of the year.Combined with this natural decline is the fact that, despite early surveillance and response lapses, China and other countries are already employing extreme measures to halt the spread. While quarantining of the entire city of Wuhan may not be sufficient — given the disease appears to have spread unchecked until it was too late — that probably won't be the last attempt to isolate the virus. China’s government, property developers and businesses are likely to implement further measures such as canceling public events and closing commercial and retail spaces.If things play out this way, it’s not impossible that the epidemic could start to subside in April, just as China’s industrial machine is revving up from its normal winter slumber. Cold weather and the long shadow of the Lunar New Year holiday typically lead to very low levels of industrial activity in January and February, before picking up to full speed between March and June.In the five years through 2018, for instance, daily pig iron production in March was about 7.4% higher on average than it was in January. Cement output ramps up even more rapidly, as warming weather makes it possible to mix concrete on building sites again: While January and February figures are often too weak to be reported by China’s statistical agency, May output over the same period averaged about 23% above the levels just two months earlier. That cycle could be particularly pronounced this year. China’s consumers are staying home during what’s traditionally been high season for shopping, dining, seeing films or traveling. A 10% fall in services consumption could cut gross domestic product growth by about 1.2 percentage points, according to S&P Global Ratings.That could, in theory, put a serious dent in output over the full year, which economists already expect to fall below the government’s target of “about 6%.” It might also violate a long-term pledge to double the country’s GDP by 2020, delivered on the eve of Xi Jinping’s accession to the Communist Party's highest leadership in 2012.Beijing is unlikely to take that sort of blow lying down. Just recall the responses to the 2003 SARS outbreak, the 2008 financial crisis, and the overzealous economic rebalancing toward consumption in 2015. As on those occasions, fixed-asset investment (particularly by state-owned companies) is likely to surge to fuel fresh industrial activity. China’s yearlong credit diet — no less serious, in its way, than the one that preceded the 2016 boom — will be loosened to inject some fresh life into a virus-hit economy.That’s likely to further defer China’s shift to an economy more dependent on consumption and less on mounting debt and carbon emissions — but it will also be bullish, not bearish, for commodities. China’s coal imports in the 12 months through June 2017 were nearly a third higher than in the preceding year; copper rose 12%, oil by 13% and iron ore by 7.7%.As the virus dies down, don’t be surprised to see that pattern play out one more time. What exactly is it about a country vowing to build two hospitals in a fortnight that makes investors think industrial commodities are heading for the sick bay?To contact the author of this story: David Fickling at dfickling@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Rachel Rosenthal at rrosenthal21@bloomberg.netThis column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.David Fickling is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering commodities, as well as industrial and consumer companies. He has been a reporter for Bloomberg News, Dow Jones, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and the Guardian.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinionSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
- Simply Wall St.
Is Fortescue Metals Group Limited (ASX:FMG) A Smart Pick For Income Investors?
Could Fortescue Metals Group Limited (ASX:FMG) be an attractive dividend share to own for the long haul? Investors are...
- Simply Wall St.
Estimating The Fair Value Of Fortescue Metals Group Limited (ASX:FMG)
How far off is Fortescue Metals Group Limited (ASX:FMG) from its intrinsic value? Using the most recent financial...
- Simply Wall St.
Do You Know What Fortescue Metals Group Limited's (ASX:FMG) P/E Ratio Means?
This article is for investors who would like to improve their understanding of price to earnings ratios (P/E ratios...
- Investing.com
Asian Stocks Rise on Sino-U.S. Trade Hopes
Investing.com - Asian stocks rose in morning trade on Monday as China and the U.S. appeared close to agreeing on a “phase one” trade deal.
- Simply Wall St.
How Many Fortescue Metals Group Limited (ASX:FMG) Shares Did Insiders Buy, In The Last Year?
It is not uncommon to see companies perform well in the years after insiders buy shares. On the other hand, we'd be...
- Simply Wall St.
Fortescue Metals Group (ASX:FMG) Has A Rock Solid Balance Sheet
The external fund manager backed by Berkshire Hathaway's Charlie Munger, Li Lu, makes no bones about it when he says...
- Simply Wall St.
Is Now The Time To Put Fortescue Metals Group (ASX:FMG) On Your Watchlist?
It's only natural that many investors, especially those who are new to the game, prefer to buy shares in 'sexy' stocks...
- Simply Wall St.
Should Income Investors Look At Fortescue Metals Group Limited (ASX:FMG) Before Its Ex-Dividend?
Regular readers will know that we love our dividends at Simply Wall St, which is why it's exciting to see Fortescue...
- Simply Wall St.
If You Had Bought Fortescue Metals Group (ASX:FMG) Stock A Year Ago, You Could Pocket A 90% Gain Today
While Fortescue Metals Group Limited (ASX:FMG) shareholders are probably generally happy, the stock hasn't had...
- Simply Wall St.
Are Fortescue Metals Group Limited’s Returns On Capital Worth Investigating?
Today we'll look at Fortescue Metals Group Limited (ASX:FMG) and reflect on its potential as an investment...
