The address is of course of the target building; I'm actually still standing outside AT238, the apartment building on Adelaide Terrace that I described in the previous image. The next cross street (about 150 m in front of me) is Victoria Avenue after which, for reasons best known to the town planners, Adelaide Terrace becomes St George's Terrace. In other words, the South 32 headquarters that we can see is really on the same street as me, about a kilometre away.

There are a couple of other tall apartment buildings between me and that skyscraper. As I mentioned in previous shots, they are becoming increasingly common in this part of the city.

So what is South 32? Sit a spell, this will take a while.

In August 1885 a company then known as the Broken Hill Proprietary Company Limited was formed to operate a silver and lead mine in the far west town of Broken Hill in the state of New South Wales. Its history after that is complicated and convoluted, but I can give you the highlights.

Apparently ironstone is used in the smelting process for lead and silver. There wasn't much around Broken Hill but there were some rich deposits in South Australia that BHP managed to acquire in the early 1900s. They then realised that they could be using those deposits to cash in on steel production as well. By 1907 they had committed to do just that. But wait, you also need coal to make steel. Where is that? Well, Newcastle and the Illawarra have good metallurgical coal. Fine, let's build some steelworks in both of those places.

After the (second) war, hey, look, there's oil in Bass Strait! (The waterway separating mainland Australia from Tasmania.) So BHP got into that.

Meanwhile, in 1860 in the Netherlands, a company named Billiton was formed. Its initial business was the extraction of mineral resources in the then Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). By the 1940s it was mining bauxite (the ore from which aluminium is derived) in Indonesia and Suriname (north of Brazil, on the Atlantic coast). By the 1970s it was operating tin smelting in Thailand. Passing through the ownership of Shell, and a South African company named Gencor, it was merged with Gold Fields Ltd in 1998. So essentially by that time it was operating the extraction of bauxite (aluminium), silver, lead, zinc, thermal rather than metallurgical coal, gold, and manganese and I may have missed some.

In 2001 some genius decided to merge BHP and Billiton to create BHP Billiton with a dual Australian / London stock exchange listing. The advantages were obvious. Synergies! Efficiencies! Growth! Diversity! Advantages of scale! Tens of millions for consultants! Oh wait, that last one wasn't supposed to be out loud.

Except... most of the Billiton assets were underperforming and being merged into a company such that there would ultimately be 41 operating assets did them no good since management could not focus on allocating capital within the company optimally.

So what happened? In 2015 there was a demerger or spin off which more or less, roughly, split the old Billiton assets back out. Selling them off in a period of plunging commodity prices wouldn't fly; there were no buyers. So a demerger in which BHP shareholders received 1 share in the new entity for every one that they owned in BHP was the way to go. The advantages were obvious. "Management will have a better focus!" "The spun off businesses won't have to compete for capital with other divisions!" Tens of millions for consultants! Wait, what? Ooooh, $738 million for consultants? OK, got it. What? That last one wasn't supposed to be out loud either?

The name of that spin off? South 32.

Yes, as a BHP shareholder I acquired a holding in South 32 but, shamed though I am to admit it, I haven't kept up on what it's mining or where. I know it's flogging off its thermal coal mines in the Illawarra, but not much else. This shot has reminded me that I need to rectify that, so I've just gone through and downloaded all of the annual reports for the last few years.

Sigh, no wonder it takes so long to get through my photo galleries.

It does look rather nice in the pre-dawn light, though.