PERTH (miningweekly.com) – Mining giant BHP Billiton this week shipped its one-billionth tonne of iron-ore to China.
CEO Andrew Mackenzie said on Friday that China was of immense importance to BHP and to Australia as a whole, with the company striving to develop closer ties with the Asian nation and to contribute to its development by providing long-term, reliable and high-quality products at a transparent market price.
“BHP is very proud of the role it has helped play in China’s remarkable economic and urban growth through the trade in iron-ore and other commodities. The rate of this growth and the demand for iron-ore has been unprecedented,” Mackenzie said.
He pointed out that it took BHP about 30 years to ship 100-million tonnes of iron-ore to China, and only 12 years to reach the one-billion tonne milestone.
Mackenzie this week told reporters in Shanghai that the miner was expecting Chinese steel consumption growth to slow over the next year, with BHP adjusting its supply strategies accordingly.
"We anticipated the change towards current market conditions and the rebalancing of supply and demand after a period of massive expansion and a time when supply struggled with demand, we saw these changes coming a long way off," Mackenzie was quoted as saying.
The mining giant was in the midst of a de-bottlenecking programme at its Pilbara operations, and iron-ore production was expected to reach 225-million tonnes a year by the end of the 2015 financial year.