Rio Tinto ramps up iron ore production as the commodity value declines

 

CANBERRA (Scrap Monster): The iron ore mining company has increased its production of the steel making raw material by 13 percent, in the month of December, when compared with the same period in the year 2013, the company also shipped away 17 percent more amount of iron ore in the year 2014, compared with 2013.

 

The company increased its production, when the spot price of iron ore declined from 135 dollars per dry metric tonne in the month of January 2014 to about 70 dollars per tonne by the end of the year in the major port of Qingdao, based in China.

 

The company had stated that, it had achieved an average of 84.30 dollars per wet metric tonne, which would imply that the price obtained from the dry tonne is higher than that.

 

The company, in total shipped about 82.2 million tonnes of iron ore in the last quarter, and also about 302.6 million tonnes, over the year 2014. The iron ore production in the company also hiked by about12 percent over the quarter, and 11 percent over the whole year, with the numbers sli8ghtly lower than the company had shipped.

 

Major amount of the iron ore came from the Pilbara region of Western Australia, with the production of iron ore at about 280.6 million tonnes, of which the share o0f the company was 231.5 million tonnes, and the rest of it was consumed by the joint venture partners of the company. The expansion of production in the mines of the company will continue to proceed in this year. The company has also stated that, the infrastructure of its 360 million tonnes per year expansion, has been about 80 percent complete, and the company also expects to extract 330 million tonnes of ore from the Pilbara region this year.