(Minews) - Gina Rinehart, Asia-Pacific’s richest woman, said iron ore plummeted more than expected and prices could be low for some time amid a supply glut.
“None of us predicted it would be as bad as this,” Rinehart, chairman of Hancock Prospecting Pty, said Friday at a mining industry lunch in Sydney. “Nobody was predicting -- even the most conservative ones -- the ore price crash.”
Iron ore prices had the largest quarterly loss since 2009 in the three months through March and fell to a decade-low of $47.08 a dry metric ton earlier this month, before climbing back to $54.82 Thursday, according to Metal Bulletin Ltd. data.
Rinehart’s comments come as she prepares to start her $10 billion iron ore project in Western Australia. Roy Hill, Australia’s largest single iron ore mine, is on track to begin exports in September, adding 55 million metric tons a year of output to a market already saturated by a growing surplus.
“The ore price could be down for quite some time,” according to Rinehart, who has an estimated wealth of about $12.5 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. “Will it be down forever? Of course not.”
Iron-ore prices jumped earlier this week after BHP Billiton Ltd. curbed the pace of its expansion program. The strategy of BHP and the other large miners of continuing to increase output in the face of a price rout has raised the ire of some analysts, investors and rivals.
