BHP's Most Likely Target: Freeport McMoRan

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Aussie mining giant BHP Billiton(BHP Quote) is rich and ravenous. According to recent reports, the company has $18 billion lying around, awaiting use, and judging by recent remarks from its executives, one of those uses could very well be a mammoth takeout of a publicly held rival (though, admittedly, not on the scale of its failed attempt to subsume Rio Tinto(RTP Quote) in 2007).

An article in The Wall Street Journal this week posited four potential candidates as possible acquisition targets for BHP. We asked you to handicap the field.

The winner by a narrow margin, with 39.7% of the vote, was Phoenix-based Freeport McMoRan Copper & Gold(FCX Quote), a company with mining interests the globe over and a market cap of $27.5 billion. Should BHP and Freeport ever strike a deal, it would be a cross-border blockbuster on the scale of the Anheuser-Busch sale to Belgium megabrewer Inbev last year.

Coming in a close second with 35.3% of the clicks, was Potash(POT Quote), the Canadian fertilizer behemoth with a stock market value of about $26.5 billion. BHP has signaled recently its interest in expanding its potash business.

The rest of the choices were weak contenders, and for good reason. Anglo American (10.3% of the votes) is a world-class platinum miner, and BHP has said it has no interest in platinum mining. Xstrata (7.5%), the U.K.-based coal miner, overlaps with BHP's own coal assets, which could cause onerous antitrust issues. And Vale(VALE Quote) (7.2%), the enormous Brazilian ore extractor, is majority-owned by its own government and thus an unlikely target, as our readers clearly understood.

-- Written by Scott Eden in New York

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