Mr Tom Albanese CEO of Rio Tinto said that its management will be better than BHP Billiton at making the most of Rio's great assets.

Mr Albanese said that "You can't just assume that bigger equals better. We have seen, not in the mining sector but in other sectors, which once businesses get past a certain size, history has shown they have lost their ability to deliver on their strategic promises."

He said that "There are always economies of scale but they have to be matched against the capacity to deliver. Rio has the economies of scale. We have the ability to deliver. We have demonstrated that with our superior performance in the Pilbara, superior performance in all the sectors that we have delivered."

He confidently describes Rio's operations in the Pilbara as the premier iron ore business in Australia and dismisses the strong criticism of inevitable delays in reaping the bottom line benefits from the Alcan acquisition as a narrow concern of the Australian media only.

This is an even more sensitive argument than the continuing fight over value that features Rio insisting that the current BHP Billiton offer is just not good enough for Rio shareholders. It also runs counter to the trend towards ever greater consolidation of even the largest, most successful companies in the global mining industry.