Cliffs Natural Resources Inc announced that it has taken up approximately 195.5 million common shares of Spider Resources Inc that were validly tendered as of July 16th 2010 under Cliffs' offer to purchase all of the Common Shares. When combined with Cliffs' prior holdings, Cliffs now owns approximately 81.8% of Spider on a fully diluted basis, up from 52.1% previously.

Cliffs has extended the time of expiry for the Offer to July 26th 2010 in order to permit additional shares to be tendered. All Common Shares validly tendered by the extended expiry time will be taken up and paid for under the Offer. The Offer price is CAD 0.19 per share of Spider, a premium of 138% over the closing price of the Common Shares on the TSX Venture Exchange on May 21st 2010, the last trading day prior to Cliffs' announcement of its intention to bid for the Common Shares.

Mr William C Boor president of Cliffs' Ferroalloys business unit said that “Now that Cliffs has over 80% of Spider's shares, Cliffs has achieved its objective of gaining control over the Big Daddy chromite deposit. Even so, we have decided to give the remaining Spider shareholders a further opportunity to tender to our Offer in July, so that they don't have to wait for several months to receive the same price under a compulsory acquisition or squeeze out transaction.”