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Iron Ore

Brazil’s Vale mulling IPO for part of base metals business – sources – by Nicole Mordant and Euan Rocha (Reuters U.S. – December 1, 2014)

http://www.reuters.com/

VANCOUVER/TORONTO – Dec 1 (Reuters) – Brazil’s Vale SA is considering listing part of its global base metals business, two sources with knowledge of the matter said on Monday, as the miner looks to fund capital projects amid a collapse in iron ore prices.

The sources, who asked not to be named as they have not been authorized to discuss the matter publicly, said the world’s top iron ore producer is likely to retain a majority interest in the new entity if it proceeds with the plan.

Vale could outline the plan to list a new entity in Toronto and London as early as Tuesday at an investor day event being held in New York, said one of the sources.

The event at the New York Stock Exchange will be webcast. The second source said there had been significant discussion inside Vale about listing the base metals assets, which have fared better than its iron ore business due to steadier prices.

A Vale spokeswoman in Brazil could not be reached for comment after hours.

Vale’s iron ore business contributed 62 percent of the company’s gross revenue in the third quarter. Outside of iron ore, Vale’s global asset portfolio includes nickel assets in Canada, Indonesia and New Caledonia, coal mines in Australia and Mozambique as well as copper projects in Canada, Brazil and Zambia.

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Can cost-cutting break Rio Tinto’s link with iron ore price? – by Clyde Russell (Reuters U.S. – December 1, 2014)

http://www.reuters.com/

LAUNCESTON, Australia – (Reuters) – Rio Tinto launched a stirring defense of its iron ore strategy last week, with the basic message that it will still make huge profits even as the price slumps to five-year lows.

Leaving aside, for the moment, that some of Rio Tinto’s price and demand assumptions for the steel-making ingredient still look heroic, the real question to be answered is can the company convince the market that it’s on the right path?

To do so, Rio Tinto will have to break the shackles of the strong correlation of its share price to that of Asian spot iron ore.

Since the 2008 recession the Australian-listed shares of the world’s second-biggest iron ore miner have moved pretty much in lockstep with the price of the steel-making ingredient, although this year the correlation has shown signs of breaking down.

Iron ore has fallen a dramatic 48 percent this year, with the close on Nov. 28 of $69.80 a tonne only marginally above the $68 reached on Nov. 26, which was the weakest since June 11, 2009. Rio Tinto’s shares ended at A$59.10 ($49.64) on Nov. 28, down just 13.3 percent for the year.

The question is whether the nexus between the share price and iron ore has broken or whether the relationship is likely to be restored, most probably by the shares losing value since the prospect of iron ore rebounding is slim given the huge supply overhang in the market.

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Globe-Trotting Vale CEO Faces Wall Street as Iron Plunges – by Juan Pablo Spinetto (Bloomberg News – December 1, 2014)

http://www.bloomberg.com/

Vale SA’s chief executive officer says he travels so much that the mining company’s executive jet is among the most flown in Bombardier Inc.’s fleet this year.

“I like to visit all our operations at least once a year but normally I go more than that,” Murilo Ferreira said in an interview at the company’s Rio de Janeiro headquarters on Nov. 26. “I travel a lot, a lot, a lot,” he said in a weary tone.

Ferreira, 61, will board his Global Express XRS jet to visit investors in New York and London this week, adding to the more than 240,000 kilometers (149,000 miles) flown in the first 10 months of 2014. On the agenda? How the world’s largest iron-ore producer will adapt to a collapse in the price of the commodity that prompted analysts to have the bleakest opinions about the stock since at least 1999.

Vale is producing iron ore at a record pace and its base metals unit — which for years experienced delays, accidents and stoppages — is finally starting to contribute to profits. Yet expanding global supply at a time of slowing demand in China, the largest consumer of metals, has pushed down prices of the steelmaking raw material to the lowest in more than five years and made Vale the worst performing major mining stock.

The reaction from Vale, as with other mining companies, has been to cut costs, put lower-return expansions on hold and focus on its most profitable businesses. The company probably will announce tomorrow a $10.4 billion budget for next year excluding research and development expenses, the lowest since 2009 and 25 percent below last year’s approved capital expenditures, according to the average of nine analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg News.

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Iron ore prices could stay depressed for 10 years – by Scott Murdoch (The Australian – December 1, 2014)

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business

A PROMINENT Chinese fund manager has grimly forecast that the global iron ore price could remain under pressure for 10 years as oversupply continues to hit the market and the Chinese residential property market slumps.

Shanghai Jianfeng vice-president Liang Ruian believes prices could slide below $US60 a tonne within the next year and could even fall to as low as $US50 a tonne, with major consequences for miners around the world.

The iron price on the weekend was $US71.32 a tonne, up $US1.34, but the commodity is down more than 50 per cent this year. The price slide has prompted miners to rethink capital expenditure plans and intensifies pressure on companies struggling to bring projects to the production stage.

Mr Liang, a well known fund manager in Shanghai, said the price of iron ore would be heavily affected by the performance of the domestic Chinese real estate ¬market.

About 30 per cent of China’s steel output is used in residential development, which is forecast to remain flat in the next few years after a surge following the global financial crisis. It is estimated China now has a nationwide inventory of housing to last up to three years.

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Wabush woes: Labrador mining town reels from a China slowdown – by Rachelle Younglai (Globe and Mail – November 29, 2014)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

WABUSH, LABRADOR — Ron Barron has spent 30 years working in the Wabush mine, one of three generations of Barrons who have toiled in the open pits in what western Labrador bills as the iron ore capital of Canada.

The family’s roots run deep here. Mr. Barron’s father was one of Wabush‘s first settlers, who not only got a job in the mine when it opened in the 1960s but also helped organize a union. Five of Mr. Barron’s brothers have worked in the same pits along with his son and nephew.

But now Mr. Barron’s life has been upended along with the rest of city. The Wabush mine, once the cornerstone of this community, is shutting down along with another iron ore mine called Bloom Lake in neighbouring Quebec. More than 1,000 miners will be out of work, not to mention a slew of other job losses from businesses that service the industry. It’s a crippling blow in an area with a population of about 9,000.

“Oh my god, everybody loses. All the organizations, the schools, everything loses. Everything will suffer because of it,” said Mr. Barron, who will be officially out of a job by mid-December. “We have had shutdowns and layoffs before, but this is different. The mine is closing.”

The reason for the closings is simple: The price of iron ore, a key ingredient in steel, has been in freefall, falling 60 per cent in three years. Where the resource once traded as high as $190 (U.S.) a tonne in 2011, it is now below $70.

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Iron-Ore Giant Vale Sees Rebound as Glut Squeezes Mines – by Juan Pablo Spinetto and Peter Millard (Bloomberg News – November 27, 2014)

 http://www.bloomberg.com/

Iron-ore prices are poised to rebound from five-year lows as Asian infrastructure demand improves and high-cost mines close, according to the top producer Vale SA. (VALE5)

The steelmaking raw material, which slumped 49 percent this year to $68.49 a dry metric ton yesterday, will return to an average range of $85 to $90 next year, Chief Executive Officer Murilo Ferreira said in an interview. Prices jumped 2.2 percent today, the most in seven weeks. Vale isn’t considering slowing its expansions because of slumping prices and is pressing ahead with the $19.7 billion Serra Sul S11D mine and logistics project, the industry’s biggest, he said.

“There was a lot of volatility in prices this year and the market is undershooting at the moment and this will bring about a correction,” Ferreira, 61, said at the company’s headquarters in Rio de Janeiro yesterday. “This correction will come through the closure of many inefficient miners of high cost and poor quality iron ore.”

Vale, Rio Tinto Group (RIO) and BHP Billiton Ltd. are maintaining their expansions betting that higher-cost producers will be squeezed out of the market. The price plunge, including a 20 percent drop in the past three months, is prompting speculation China will close inefficient mines, while Cliffs Natural Resources Inc. is considering shutting a mine in Canada.

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Iron Ore Caps Monthly Decline as Seaborne Supplies Increase – by Jasmine Ng (Bloomberg News – November 28, 2014)

http://www.businessweek.com/

Iron ore completed a monthly loss as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said it may cut its forecast of $80 a metric ton for 2015 amid competition among seaborne producers.

Ore with 62 percent content delivered to Qingdao in China slumped 10.4 percent this month after reaching $68.49 a dry ton on Nov. 26, the lowest level since June 2009, according to data compiled by Metal Bulletin Ltd. Prices advanced 1.9 percent to $71.32 today, posting the first weekly gain in six.

The steel-making raw material has plunged 47 percent in 2014 as BHP Billiton Ltd. (BHP), Rio Tinto Group (RIO) and Vale SA expand output in Australia and Brazil, betting the increase will offset slumping prices and force less competitive mines worldwide to close. A property slump and slowdown in investment growth has set China, the biggest buyer, on course for the weakest full-year growth since 1990.

“We believe the risks are clearly skewed to the downside,” Goldman analysts Christian Lelong and Amber Cai wrote in a report e-mailed today. The New York-based bank has kept its prediction unchanged since March 2013. The raw material averaged $99.73 this year.

For now, the bank said it was keeping its average price forecasts unchanged partly because of the uncertainty related to recent Chinese statistics.

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Iron ore prices – Where’s the bottom? (Northern Miner Editorial – Novmeber 26, 2014)

The Northern Miner, first published in 1915, during the Cobalt Silver Rush, is considered Canada’s leading authority on the mining industry.

As the daylight hours shorten and winter chill takes hold of the iron ore mines and surrounding communities in the Labrador Trough, it’s as good a symbol as any of the deep freeze that is engulfing the global iron ore market, as spot prices continue to head south.

Back in October, Cliffs Natural Resources said it would permanently close its Wabush iron ore mine on the Labrador side of the Trough, after having laid off some 500 workers in February when it first idled the mine.

And now Cliffs says it has failed in its attempts to find investment partners for the US$1.2-billion expansion of its Bloom Lake iron ore mine on the Quebec side of the Trough — an expansion that the struggling major said was needed to make the Bloom Lake mine financially viable.

While Cliffs had been optimistic about finding such financial partners as recently as a month ago, layoff notices have been sent to some 400 workers at Bloom Lake ahead of the closure of the entire Bloom Lake complex, which will take affect in mid-December. Around 80 workers will be kept for care and maintenance.

Cliffs now states bluntly that it is pursuing its “exit options” for all its Eastern Canadian iron ore assets. Perhaps the biggest surprise in the announcement is the high price tag that Cliffs has put on closing shop and leaving Eastern Canada: up to US$700 million in the next five years.

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While Australian Miners Declare End of Massive Expansion of Iron Ore, Gina Rinehart Bucks Trend & Starts Export From New Mine – by Vittorio Hernandez (International Business Times – November 24, 2014)

 

http://au.ibtimes.com/

Gina Rinehart is the richest person in Australia and would likely remain that way for a long time. One reason behind her wealth, aside from inheriting Hancock Prospecting established by her father, Lang Hancock, is her bucking business trends.

Like her dad who dared invest in mining in areas that were considered outback, Rinehart will begin to export in September 2015 from her $8.6 billion iron ore mine despite prices of the commodity hitting a five-year low and bleak forecast for the next few months due to global oversupply and weak Chinese demand.

Rinehart told media that over 2 million metric tons of iron ore are stockpiled at Roy Hill where project construction is 67 percent complete. She said that since Roy Hill is a fast-schedule, major and really complicated projects, its being ahead of schedule is fantastic.

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COLUMN-BHP, Rio were right on iron ore demand, wrong on supply – by Clyde Russell (Reuters U.K. – November 24, 2014)

http://uk.reuters.com/

LAUNCESTON, Australia, Nov 24 (Reuters) – What was lacking at BHP Billiton’s annual meeting was an admission that what has effectively happened with iron ore is that the company’sshareholders are subsidising the profits of Chinese steel mills.

Instead, what Chairman Jac Nasser told the media after the AGM on Nov. 20 was iron ore prices were “not inconsistent with the expectations we had built into our long-term investment”. Both Nasser and Chief Executive Andrew Mackenzie were keen to emphasize the productivity successes at the iron ore business, saying it remains one of BHP’s main profit drivers.

That may well be true, but the message from the executives at last week’s AGM doesn’t quite tally with what BHP was saying in 2011, when it was approving the massive expansion of its iron ore operations in Western Australia.

It was around this time that BHP, its Anglo-Australian rival Rio Tinto, newcomer Fortescue Metals Group and top iron ore miner Brazil’s Vale were all making decisions to radically boost output of the steel-making ingredient.

This unprecedented capacity expansion was based on the two-pronged view that China, which buys about two-thirds of seaborne iron ore, would continue its rapid growth for decades to come, and that low-cost producers would be able to force higher-cost miners from the market.

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Go where it is darkest: When company, country, currency and commodity risk collide! – by Aswath Damodaran (Musings on Markets – November 20, 2014)

http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.ca/

Aswath Damodaran is a Professor of Finance at the Stern School of Business at NYU.

You learn valuation (and find out how much you don’t know) by valuing businesses and companies, not by talking, reading or ruminating about doing valuation. That said, it is natural to want to value companies with profit-making histories and a well-established business models in mature markets. You will have an easier time building valuation models and you will arrive at more precise estimates of value, but not only will you learn little about valuation in the process, it is also unlikely that you will find immense bargains, because the same qualities that made this company easy to value for you also make it easier to value for others, and more importantly, easier to price.

I believe that your biggest payoff is in valuing companies where there is uncertainty about the future, because that is where people are most likely to abandon valuation first principles and go with the herd. So, if you are a long-term investor interested in finding bargains, my advice to you is to go where it is darkest, where micro and macro uncertainty swirl around every input and where every estimate seems like a stab in the dark. I will not claim that this is easy or comes naturally to anyone, but I have a few coping mechanisms that work for me, which I describe in this paper.

While I enjoy valuing companies with uncertain futures, there are cases where my serenity about valuation is disturbed by the coming together of multiple uncertainties, piling on and feeding of each other to create a maelstrom. In this post, I want to focus on two companies, one Brazilian (Vale) and one Russian (Lukoil), where bad corporate governance, a spike in country risk, currency weakness and plunging commodity prices have conspired to devastating effect on their stock prices.

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Cliffs Natural Resources retreats from Canadian ‘disaster’ – by Nicolas Van Praet (Globe and Mail – November 21, 2014)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

MONTREAL — The chief executive officer of mining giant Cliffs Natural Resources Inc. is taking aim at his predecessors for their decision to pump billions of dollars into Canada, saying every single investment it made here in recent years was a “disaster” that failed to produce any profit.

“I’m walking away from Canada big time – Canada for Cliffs has not been a good thing,” Lourenco Goncalves, the company’s chairman and CEO, said in an interview Thursday. “All these investments that the company made in Canada after the Wabush mine were a disaster.”

“I’m not the type of guy that’s too much of a Monday morning quarterback,” he said. “But these [decisions] are very clear. Misguided decisions all the way.”

Cleveland-based Cliffs, the biggest U.S. iron ore producer, has spent $6-billion (U.S.) in all on its Bloom Lake iron ore mine in northeastern Quebec over the past three years and “never made a penny” on the investment, Mr. Goncalves said. The company on Wednesday announced that it is “pursuing exit options” for its Eastern Canadian iron ore operations, evaluating its maximum exposure to close the Bloom Lake site at $700-million. The company will also close its mine in Wabush, Nfld., which had been in operation for more than 40 years.

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Richest Woman in Asia-Pacific Buys Iron as BHP Calls End to Era – by Jasmine Ng and David Stringer (Bloomberg News – November 21, 2014)

http://www.bloomberg.com/

Gina Rinehart, the Asia-Pacific’s richest woman, is set to start exports in September from her new A$10 billion ($8.6 billion) iron ore mine undeterred by prices trading near five-year lows and forecast to extend losses.

“We don’t like the ore price going down, but we’re in the lower quartile” of production costs, Rinehart, chairman of Hancock Prospecting Pty, said yesterday in an interview at the Roy Hill mine in Australia’s iron-rich Pilbara region.

She was talking just hours after Andrew Mackenzie, chief executive officer of BHP Billiton Ltd. (BHP), called an end to the era of “massive expansions of iron ore.” BHP and rivals Rio Tinto Group (RIO) and Vale SA (VALE5) are flooding the global market, spurring a surplus after a $120 billion spending spree to boost the capacity of their mines from Australia to Brazil.

“I don’t think next year would be ideal to be adding new supply,” Daniel Morgan, a Sydney-based analyst at UBS AG, said in a Nov. 17. phone interview. “The market is pretty well supplied for the next few years.”

BHP stock lost 4.7 percent in Sydney this week for the biggest weekly loss since March, while Rio shares fell 6.1 percent. Fortescue Metals Group (FMG) Ltd., the country’s third-biggest shipper, retreated 54 percent this year.

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RPT-Quebec’s ambitious Plan Nord mineral project goes south – by Allison Lampert and Nicole Mordant (Reuters India – November 21, 2014)

http://in.reuters.com/

Nov 20 (Reuters) – A plan by the Canadian province of Quebec to spend billions to develop the mineral riches of its northern region has been dealt a crippling blow by the pending closure of a major mine as iron ore prices sink and China’s interest wanes.

The Plan Nord project hopes to attract C$80 billion ($71 billion) of investment to the vast northern region, of which the iron ore-rich Labrador Trough is a major component. The French-speaking province is trying to sell the plan globally and is hoping miners will flock to northern Quebec after the government invests in the infrastructure necessary to open it up.

But Plan Nord took a big hit on Wednesday, when Cliffs Natural Resources said it is closing its Bloom Lake iron ore mine after struggling to secure funds to expand the mine and make it viable. Chinese steelmaker Wuhan Iron & Steel owns a minority stake in Bloom Lake.

Bloom Lake, one of three producing iron ore mines in Quebec, would have become a major customer for a railway line being considered under Plan Nord.

“Without Bloom Lake there’s no Plan Nord,” Cliffs Chief Executive Lourenco Goncalves told Reuters. “Without the mine, there’s pretty much nothing for Plan Nord to transport from point A to point B.”

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Rock-bottom prices forcing Cliffs to pull up stakes in Canada – by Bertrand Marotte and Nicolas Van Praet (Globe and Mail – November 20, 2014)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

MONTREAL — Cliffs Natural Resources Inc.’s Canadian adventure is winding down. The Ohio-based mining giant is preparing to shut down its money-losing Bloom Lake iron ore mine in northeastern Quebec amid rock-bottom prices for the mineral and high operating costs. It has already closed a Labrador iron ore property at Wabush and said it is looking to sell its chromite deposits in northern Ontario’s Ring of Fire.

Cliffs has spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing the high-potential Ring of Fire deposit and the existing Lake Bloom operations, but has run into a series of roadblocks, including a five-year low for iron ore prices, slumping Chinese demand and major delays in getting agreements with Ontario and First Nations over essential infrastructure for the Ring of Fire.

A shutdown of Bloom Lake would be a major blow to the local economy and to the provincial government’s multibillion-dollar Plan Nord economic development strategy pinned on natural resources extraction north of the 49th parallel.

Likewise, the Ontario government had made the Ring of Fire the centrepiece of its ambitious development plans for the mineral-rich region about 500 kilometres northeast of Thunder Bay in the James Bay Lowlands. And Cliffs had been the leading mining player in that plan.

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