RE:close getting better..... I'm on the record as thinking $50 is possible, but I also think it's an outlier and not likely. That's $5 billion on a buyout, and while Stone Canyon paid $3.2 billion for Morton Salt, they paid that for a producing asset and the retail structure around the products sold out of that asset as well. That mine stops producing, the asset still has value commercially. $5 billion is three times the entire market cap of Compass Minerals and ALL of its assets.
It would take a colossal bidding war between very desperate parties to bid it up to $50 a share.
And no, whoever owns Great Atlantic does not corner a market. I already outlined that elsewhere. They get a VERY good asset that any producer would want, its going to be THE low cost asset to possess in the market space, but even if they start off at 10 million tons per instead of the projected 2 million tons, all that does is displace road salt imports...it doesn't corner the market.
My own due diligence tells me that prior to the most recent spate of news a realistic buyout in a competative market would be $12, and now I'm thinking $16. Do I hope its $50? Yeah, but I just don't see that as the likely outcome.