Global iron ore prices rose again on Monday, hitting new multi-year highs, despite another fall in import volumes into China in November.
The Metal Bulletin’s Fast Markets price for 62% Fe fines delivered to northern China rose $US1.93 a tonne to $US146.93, the highest since late 2013.
The 1.3% rise on Monday followed the 5.8% jump last Friday (which took the week’s rise to more than 11%).
The rise came as China’s imports of iron ore topped the billion-tonne mark with one month to go in the year and in doing so also topped 2019’s full-year total.
Customers figures showed that imports for the 11 months to November totalled 1.073 billion tonnes, beating full-year imports of 1.06 billion tonnes in 2019,
Imports totalled 98.15 million tonnes last month, compared with 106.74 million tonnes of imports in October, according to data released by the General Administration of Customs.
That was up 8.3% from November 2019 but down 8.1% from October.
But the November figures was 15% under the all-time high of 112.7 million tonnes hit in July of this year.
The steel mills have made up for the shortfall in the past couple of weeks by running down port stocks.
That can’t go on for long and with Brazil now forecasting lower shipments than forecast a real squeeze could develop that would see prices of ore surge to unsustainable levels.
The all-time high price for iron ore is more than $US190 a tonne back in May 2011. It then fell into 2012 and continued dropping for another four years, bottoming out around $US43 a tonne in 2016.
The rise will push the shares of BHP, Rio Tinto, and Fortescue higher on Tuesday for a while, but weakness in the Dow and S&P 500 might check that rise.
BHP shares rose 2.1% on Monday, Rio shares were up 3.8% and Fortescue Metals shares ended up nearly 2.5%.
