dailyreckoning.com.au / By Dan Denning / January 21st, 2013
A currency war isn’t the same thing as a shooting war, at least not at the beginning. But there are certainly casualties. In today’s Daily Reckoning, we take a look at the winners, losers, and the next stage of the great battle of all against all, in which the sides aren’t really what they appear.
Former Rio Tinto CEO Tom Albanese is a casualty. But don’t you worry about him. He’ll land on his feet and be just fine. The real losers from Rio’s strategic failure over the last few years are the shareholders. It will be interesting to see if the shareholders put pressure on Rio’s board, which is every bit to blame for the company’s performance as the CEO.
We’re not just trying to assess blame, though. That’s all too easy and all too common. Instead, we reckon Rio’s changing of the guard signals that the easy money – and probably the big money – from the commodity boom is over. Like the whole commodity sector, Rio was able to ride the boom in commodity prices and then export volumes to make easy money.
But record sales aren’t necessarily an indication that directors are doing a good job managing the company’s capital. Rio ran a 33% return on capital in 2011. It was just 16.7% in 2012, according to Goldman Sachs. The company wasn’t able to take shareholder money and generate consistently high rates of return.
To be fair, maybe that’s because there weren’t too many good places to invest the money. Rio wrote down $29 billion worth of acquisitions in the last five years. A big chunk of the write-offs came from the disastrous Alcan acquisition, which was mostly made to fend off BHP’s semi-hostile take-over overtures at the time.
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