Iron ore

And then I'm delighted to also have Carsten Menke on the show today as well.

And I'll be getting his latest thoughts this morning on iron ore. That's in just a few minutes.

But first up with the market news, it is Mike.

Good morning, Mike.

Hello, Helen.

Good morning.

And we're talking about iron ore today, which hasn't really been in focus for a while.

No, that's absolutely true.

or what?

so we've we've had a really strong momentum from miners over the last year or so and that's really helped underpin the aussie market and that as you alluded to that momentum has started to slide off you've got a few commodities that are still doing relatively well like copper um but on the whole you know high rates high us dollars starting to weigh and that that's part of the composition for the aussie market you know big iron ore miners really drive drive the Aussie market and iron ore has started to weaken.

So, you know, it's sort of been resilient, unexpectedly so at around that $100 mark, but it's now sort of pushing $19.91 and that's sort of, you know, becoming a bit of an issue for those miners.

How much is China part of that story? I mean, they've traditionally been a big customer for those ores, right?

We're still below expectations there on growth.

It's growing, but it's subdued.

You've got the property market still really not generating any growth for the iron ore, but more now you're getting sort of a weight and sentiment.

You've got mega mines in Mandu starting to ramp up.

And this nickel, when multiplied by the number of bushels of grain produced in Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Michigan, reaches the stupendous figure of ninety-eight million dollars.

In the matter of iron ore, the saving is still greater.

Were it not for this saving, all steel necessities, from rails to common kitchen forks, would advance tremendously in price, and the United States would not be able to control the steel markets of the world.

Today, you can ship a ton of ore from Duluth to Ashtabula, Connaught, or Cleveland, a distance of nearly one thousand miles, for less than you can send by rail that same ton from one of these ports to Pittsburgh, a distance of only one hundred and thirty miles.

Of this about a quarter moved in a northerly direction and three-quarters toward the cities of the east.

The principal item of the upbound traffic was 14 million tons of coal.

Of the southbound, 37,513,600 tons of iron ore, 110,598,927 bushels of grain, One million one hundred fifty-nine thousand seven hundred fifty-seven tons of flour, fourteen million eight hundred eighty-eight thousand nine hundred twenty-seven bushels of flaxseed, and over one billion feet of lumber.

In nineteen seven, there was a big increase, the commerce passing through the Detroit River being over seventy-five million tons.

So it was tough.

The iron ore business specifically on the export side, we had a couple of things that, you know, that just lined up in the wrong way.

Firstly, our Demening mine is very close to the end of life.

I think I've told you at the conference that we won the port case to get our mining license transferred to be able to move on to another mine called Duering Fontaine.

[laughs]

And it's true because we had an Iron Ore- we had an Iron Range line in the 1980 US Olympic hockey team.

There were three guys from the Iron Range in Minnesota, and they, you know, they held it down against the Soviets in 1980-

[laughs]

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Iron Ore Major Fortescue's Christmas Creek Green Metal Project, which features mining technology specialist Metso's Direct Reduced Iron smelting furnace technology, has produced its first hot metal in the Pilbara, Western Australia.

The project marks an important milestone for Fortescue and Metso in developing a pathway toward producing green metal from Pilbara iron ore using new low-emission smelting technologies.

This is a significant milestone for our green metal project and another step towards producing commercial-scale green metal in Australia.

For decades, Australia has exported iron ore to the world.

The next opportunity is to create more value from that ore by producing green metal here at home, says Fortescue Metals CEO Dino Otranto.

Metso contributed the core smelting design and technology for the project with its electric DRI smelting furnace.

The technology is being tested for its potential to enable the use of Pilbara iron ore fines in lower-emission ironmaking routes.

And then looking at some of the large caps, you can see gaming business Aristocrat sold off.

Iron Ore miner Fortescue down as well.

Investment manager and retail bank Macquarie off as well.

Healthcare giant CSL down two.

The market's down about 4% in September alone, and it's wiped out all of the gains that we've chalked up this financial year to date.

Looking at commodities on Friday night, crude a little bit lower, down by about 0.5%, trading smack on $100, or $100.87. uh for wti uh brent's trading at 104 spot 49 gold prices were up about 0.8 of one percent trading at 4 378 us an ounce copper continued to be firm last week so uh it's going against the movement in copper stocks so copper uh was up about two and a quarter percent last week uh trading at six dollars sixty one us a pound and was up a little bit on friday night Iron ore prices have been a little bit soggy.

They're trying to reclaim this $100 a tonne mark, but have failed so far, trading at 97, spot 1-0.

And coal prices, 146 coming out of Newcastle.