IGO CEO Peter Bradford told MNN the company first made an approach about a year ago but it took until about September to sign a confidentiality agreement.

News of the talks leaked in the meantime and IGO publicly confirmed its interest in August 2021.

"Once we finalised the CA, it was a fairly quick due diligence process, resulting in an announcement in December," Bradford said.

What looked like a simple, straight-forward friendly $3.36 per share cash deal when first announced in December turned out to be anything but - with a few almost-curveballs thrown in along the way.

"It would have been a fairly orderly process from then, but then the whole nickel market exploded and what you don't want to have happen is for a short squeeze to happen on the commodity halfway through the deal," Bradford said.

Nickel surged to US$100,000 per tonne in March, triggered by a short squeeze as banks and brokers rushed to close part of a large position amassed by Xiang Guangda, the billionaire founder of China's leading stainless steel producer Tsingshan Holding Group. 

The London Metal Exchange controversially cancelled trades and suspended nickel trading for a number of days.

Just after that, the deal was delayed by Western Areas to allow independent expert KPMG more time to consider the implications, if any, of the volatility.

In early April, KPMG concluded the deal was neither fair nor reasonable.

Days later, IGO returned with a 15% increase in its offer price to $3.87 per share.

"We were disciplined and we stuck to our long-term price deck that we used back in December and we just worked with some of the near-term impacts created by that short squeeze," Bradford said.

"A positive impact that it had on cash in Western Areas in the March and June quarter and we factored that into our model and bumped the price based on that."

Another intriguing aspect to the deal was the arrival of Andrew Forrest's Wyloo Metals on the register of Western Areas after the takeover was announced.

Western Areas shares traded at a premium to the offer price due to speculation of a rival bid.

"That distorted pricing was really the market perception of them buying and that made all sorts of people jump into the situation," Bradford said.

"For us, it was about how we positively engaged with Wyloo to understand what they really wanted long-term and then putting in place a structure that worked for both them and us and doing that within the framework of a scheme of arrangement, which gives you a lot of flexibility to put those sort of collateral benefits in place."

Wyloo agreed to support the offer and the two companies entered into an agreement to jointly evaluate opportunities for nickel downstream processing in Australia.

The Western Areas takeover finally closed last month, funded from cash reserves and a new $900 million debt facility.

It gave IGO ownership of the Forrestania nickel operations and the long-life Cosmos development asset, as well as a 21% stake in smaller nickel producer Panoramic Resources.

It also gives the company the scale to revisit downstream processing to produce nickel sulphate for the battery industry.

"Then with the benefits of the combined balance sheet from both Western Areas and IGO, and combined technical strengths from both, gives us a huge opportunity to unlock synergies that Western Areas couldn't have unlocked themselves," Bradford said.

"And we'll start to talk about some of those with our June quarterly conference call, and through Diggers & Dealers and just talking about some of the things that we'll do to tilt the way we're developing Cosmos to turn that into a really first class mine and a bit of a showpiece from a renewable energy and electrification perspective, and that's one of the benefits you get with an 11-year asset like that."

Bradford said the integration of the Western Areas assets was going well.

"A key part of the first phase is the people aspects and making sure everyone is comfortable and everyone has an understanding of how they fit into the bigger picture," he said.

"And visibly branding, across the broader business at Cosmos and Forrestania, and then having our board up on site in that first week so they could have interactions with the people on the ground and spending a night there to do a bit of socialising.

"All those sorts of elements that give that person-to-person connectivity and really drive the people side of the equation."

Western Areas' West Perth office will be merged into IGO's South Perth headquarters from next month and Western Areas corporate employees have been guaranteed employment up until the end of the year while IGO works out the requirements of the enlarged business.

"It's going to be a real nice neat fit into what we have here at IGO and creates a great platform for us to build an even stronger culture going forward," Bradford said.

IGO has been very active on the deal front in the past couple of years and was actually the winner of the MNN Awards 2021 Deal of the Year for its US$1.4 billion acquisition of WA lithium interests and A$903 million sale of its 30% stake in the Tropicana gold mine.

Macquarie (which was IGO's financial advisor on the deal) said last week that the acquisition had made IGO a "critical minerals powerhouse".

IGO is the world's only producer of both nickel and lithium - two of the key ingredients in lithium-ion batteries.

"And cobalt and copper! Don't discount the huge amount of copper that's required in an electric vehicle as opposed to an internal combustion vehicle, and then the sprinkle of cobalt that's in there as well," Bradford said.

Macquarie has an outperform rating and A$17 price target for IGO.

Its shares traded above $15 earlier this year but have pulled back to just below $10 due to the broader market sell-off.

"With our pricing model for our spodumene sales from Greenbushes, which I think most of the market is familiar with, it will have a huge uptick in revenue price in the second half of the year, and none of that's reflected in our in our stock price," Bradford said.

"But that's just where the market is. And for businesses like ours, we just have to focus on our strategy, focus on continuing to build the business and then when sentiment returns we'll get the benefit of it in higher stock prices at that time."

IGO is a nominee for Deal of the Year in the 2022 MNN Awards.