Daily Brief Australia: ALS Ltd, Coal, Alkane Resources and more

• ALS Ltd (ALQ AU)  is looking to raise up to ~US$253m, with US$227m from a primary placement and remainder, via a non-underwritten share purchase plan (SPP) to raise up to A$40m.
• The deal will be a large one to digest at 17.9 days of the stock’s three month ADV, representing 4.1% of its shares outstanding.
• In this note, we will talk about the placement and run the deal through our ECM framework.

• In April 2025, global coal markets showed a diverging trend between thermal and metallurgical segments.
• Thermal coal remained under pressure amid softening prices, high stockpiles in China and India, and collapsing power demand in Europe, where electricity generation fell sharply due to warm weather, a major blackout in Spain, and ongoing economic stagnation in Germany.
• As a result, API2 and API4 prices slipped further, with month-ahead API2 contracts trading at $93/ton, API4 at $88/ton, and Newcastle coal easing to $95/ton, despite a brief rebound to $99 mid-month.

Since our last note on the company, Alkane Resources has announced its interim results, its Q325 quarterly activities report and, on 28 April, a merger of equals with Canada’s Mandalay Resources Corporation. The first two of these three have led us to increase our FY25 EPS estimate by over 40%, to 7.25c. The third has caused us to entirely re-evaluate the company as a merged entity from 30 June 2025.