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In the bidding war, by making upper hand State-run Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC.NS) and GAIL India (GAIL.NS) offer $2 billion to Africa-focused gas explorer Cove Energy to acquire it.

The major interesting fact is that the bidding of this week was made jointly by ONGC Videsh Ltd, the overseas investment arm of oil explorer and producer ONGC, GAIL.

Reserving top 30 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, Cove has 8.5 percent stake in Mozambique’s Rovuma Offshore Area 1.

The bidding process of sale of Cove held in January and getting opportunity Royal Dutch Shell Plc’s (RDSa.L) offer worth $1.6 billion earlier this month along with representing a pre-empt of 70 percent premium to Cove’s share price .

In this bidding contest, Thai state-controlled oil and gas group PTT also participated by offering a proposal of a $1.77 billion.

Although state-run companies like GAIL and ONGC that own a 10 percent stake each in the Rovuma block, are failed to get a large overseas acquisitions in recent years, sitting far away from bidding wars despite having huge piles of cash.

As per recent report, the state-run consortium may trump PTT and Shell’s offer for London-listed Cove, by valuing t at 245 pence-a-share, more than in comparison of other two companies.

All in all, demand from the Asia’s third largest fast growing economy needs to fulfill by adding more global resource assets.

And this may be possible through taking up opportunities over bidding of overseas coal mines as global assets by Indian steel, power and coal companies.