Mining business makes no sense without mineral assets comprising mineral rights, exploration and evaluation expenditures, development costs, ore reserves and resources. The paper is aimed at investigation of how mineral reserves and resources are evaluated and represented in financial statements of mining companies, and what kind of influence do these mineral assets exert on the market value of a company. We concluded that application of so called accounting and managerial approaches to estimation of mineral resources base gave completely different results. Despite this, ore reserves and resources are not recognized in the financial reports. This leads to occurrence of difference between market and book value of a company, which should be taken into account in business combinations. Using correlation analysis we deter-mined the dependence of capitalization and mineral resources base indicators and factors exerting influence on it. The evaluation of mineral assets as a very important part of business combination deal should be prepared on a basis of income and cost approach. The advantage of such a combination is the ability to take into account as many financial, organizational, managerial and technological factors as possible.