Hello there. It's great to be with you again. Welcome back to Emlex's podcast, covering the top stories in regulatory affairs with the help of our team of reporters around the world. My name is James Panicki.

I'm a senior editor here at Emlex. Now regular listeners would be all too familiar with the expression

killer acquisition. That's when a large established company acquires a startup or a company that

is in the early stages of its development. This can be problematic from a competition perspective

because the acquisition may be designed to neutralise a future competitor,

hence the killer monica.

And as we've seen, particularly in the tech world,

it can be tricky for regulators to manage this antitrust threat because competition laws

tend to take a snapshot of the existing field of play. So if that startup isn't a significant competitor

to the large company right now, then it can be hard to block the deal. Today we're taking

the notion of killer acquisition in a slightly

different direction. We're not talking about data sets or evanescent notions of value, but metals,

real chunks of stuff, in particular aluminum, that's aluminium for our non-US listeners.

Our mergers reporters in Brussels, Natalie McNeilis and Andrew Boyce, have been writing about

an interesting deal involving Norse Kedro and Alumetal.

And Natalie joins us right now.

And Nat, how great is it to be dealing with something a bit more real like metal?

Yes.

Yes.

So sometimes it is nice to come down from this world of cloud computing and gene sequencing

and work on something that's a bit more tangible.

So yes, this time it's about the world of metals.

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