Cameco CEO: No uranium buyout too big

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Cameco Corp's (CCO.TO: Quote, Profile, Research) top executive said on Monday that the company is looking for acquisitions and that no deal in the uranium sector could be too large to be ruled out.

Cameco CEO Jerry Grandey, speaking at the Reuters Global Mining Summit in New York, said that the number of uranium companies has mushroomed over the last five years to around 400 publicly traded companies.

He said that only recently have market values of those companies dropped to a point where Cameco can return to the acquisition strategy it exercised in the late 1990's and early in this decade.

"We acquired lots of low cost properties in that period of time and then stepped out. Now it's becoming interesting again," he said.

Cameco is the world's biggest uranium producer.

Grandey said that any acquisition would have to be big enough to be material to the company and its production volume.

"On the high side, I look out there in the universe of what might be available, and I don't think that there's anything there that's impossible for Cameco," he said.

(Reporting by Michael Erman; Editing by Christian Wiessner)