Companies from Canada and the United States accounted for nearly 52 percent of global merger and acquisition activity in the mining sector, auditors PricewaterhouseCoopers said in a study released last week. Chinese buyers managed to grab 6 percent of the market, PwC said.

"Chinese-led M&A is indisputably notable considering that Chinese buyers were negligible players in mining M&A only five years ago," PwC wrote in the study. "However, few Chinese buyers have successfully secured controlling stakes in world leading mining companies. ... The notion that China is amassing control of global mining commodities supply via M&A is unfounded."

It's true that the overall sector is booming.

PwC said it listed nearly 2,700 mining deals worth $113 billion in 2010, an 80 percent increase in total sales volume compared to the previous year. Mines with a primary resource of gold, copper coal, fertilizer minerals and iron ore -- which PwC lists as the five key resources -- dominated the deals.

"No other global industry sector has experienced comparable growth rates or volumes," PwC said, adding that it expects a heightened level of purchase activities in 2011. Until mid-February, PwC said, companies had announced transactions worth $27 billion.

While the five key resources should once again dominate deals, other purchase targets will likely include junior rare earth projects, uranium projects as countries increasingly bank on nuclear power and targets in complementary extractive industries, like shale, PwC said.

Companies will move into so-called frontier markets to acquire projects, in deals in which understanding and managing political risk will be critical success, PwC said.

With the world's population estimated to reach 8.3 billion by 2030, there may not be enough resources for all, PwC warns.

"Competition over depleting resources will only intensify," Manfred Wiegand, a PwC partner and one of the key authors of the report, said in a statement e-mailed to reporters.

Then, even China might live up to its hype.

The PwC analysts said they expect the Chinese to take "a more aggressive approach to outbound M&A and also to develop and consolidate the fragmented Chinese mining sector."

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