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Non-Tech : The Brazil Board -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: kidl who wrote (488)9/9/2011 4:11:15 AM
From: elmatador1 Recommendation  Respond to of 2508
 
COSCO is a sign of:
China grand script has many subscripts due internal conflict of interests of groups of people who do not want to work for the overall benefit of the Chinese economy or its consumers.
Message 27620936

And
Message 27622803

See also

China looks to save struggling shipping sector
reuters.com



To: kidl who wrote (488)9/28/2011 4:29:54 PM
From: elmatador  Respond to of 2508
 
CHINA'S enormous appetite for iron ore will continue to grow, with major ore producers expecting the country's imports to hit one billion tonnes a year by 2015 -- a 60 per cent increase on last year's total



theaustralian.com.au



To: kidl who wrote (488)10/8/2011 3:32:43 PM
From: elmatador  Respond to of 2508
 
Vale SA discovered deposits of rare-earth minerals at its giant Salobo copper-mine project at Carajas in Para state, similar to quality at some Australian deposits, a leading Brazilian minerals researcher said late last week.

Salobo, in which Vale is investing around $2.33 billion, is one of Vale's biggest copper projects. It is scheduled to start producing copper in 2012, with production of 100,000 metric tons copper in its first phase and a doubling of that capacity by 2014. Salobo has similar rare-earth potential to Australia's Olympic Dam multimineral deposit, according to Mr. Villas-Boas.

Brazil's Vale Discovers Rare Earths in Amazon
online.wsj.com



To: kidl who wrote (488)10/19/2011 2:44:10 AM
From: elmatador  Respond to of 2508
 
Brazil's Vale open to new iron-ore price mechanism will maintain the quarterly contract pricing system for iron ore sales, but is willing to look at other options on a case-by-case basis

Brazil's Vale open to new iron-ore price mechanism
Oct. 19, 2011, 12:22 a.m. EDT By Diana Kinch

RIO DE JANEIRO -(MarketWatch)- Brazilian miner Vale SA (VALE, VALE5.BR) is open to other forms of negotiations for setting iron ore prices beyond the existing quarterly talks, the company's Chief Executive Officer Murilo Ferreira said Tuesday, Brazil's Estado newswire reported.

Vale will maintain the quarterly contract pricing system for iron ore sales, but is willing to look at other options on a case-by-case basis, Ferreira told reporters in Brasilia, the newswire said.

The quarterly pricing system for iron ore was introduced in April 2010 after the previous annual benchmark system collapsed on pressure from Chinese steelmakers who preferred to buy at cheaper prices closer to those on the spot market. Recently some Chinese steelmakers have again pressured for prices lower than contract prices, as spot prices have fallen.

Vale's policy isn't to sell on the spot market, although specific requests from customers can be considered, Ferreira said Tuesday, Estado said.



To: kidl who wrote (488)10/25/2011 3:37:25 PM
From: elmatador  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 2508
 
Vale shipments to China to blame for soft market-Rio ore chief

World No. 2 iron ore producer Rio Tinto on Tuesday blamed Vale for sharply falling spot prices of the steelmaking raw material, saying its bigger rival is diverting European shipments to China. The move by Vale had not caused Rio to stop running its own iron ore mines at full capacity, Rio's iron ore division head and Australian chief executive Sam Walsh said.

"My business is shipping flat out," Walsh told a business forum in Perth on Tuesday. "We are producing at record rates."

Spot iron ore prices have shed 19 percent so far this month in a sell-off largely fueled by slower construction steel demand in China, the world's biggest buyer of imported iron ore at around 400 million tonnes a year.

In Europe, a more important market for Vale than Rio, steel markets have taken a knock given uncertainty surrounding the region's debt crisis.

Growth of Europe's steel production will slow in 2012 along with activity in the steel-using sectors, Eurofer, the European steel producers association, has forecast.

Spot iron ore prices on Tuesday fell nearly 4 percent. It was the biggest single-day drop since August 2009 as thin demand from China forced some traders to sell at a loss.

"Traders who can't hold positions because they don't have sufficient funding are selling at a loss of $40-$45 a tonne," said a Singapore-based iron ore trader.



Despite price falls, all three mega-producers including Rio are ramping up production, with Walsh downplaying the lasting effect of Vale's strategy.

"There's a limit to what they can physically ship," Walsh later told Reuters on the sidelines of the forum. "We're not overly concerned about that."

He said Rio remains confident in the long-term drivers of economic growth and iron ore demand in China.

"The issue is contagion. It's perception, it's fears," he said. "When you look at the fundamentals of China, India, South Asia, North Asia, we find it's very robust."

BHP Billiton , the world's third-largest iron ore producer, was equally sanguine about the outlook.

"We always produce flat out because we're low cost producers," BHP's chief commercial officer, Alberto Calderon, told Reuters on the sidelines of the forum.

Economist Nouriel Roubini, dubbed Dr Doom after accurately predicting the global financial crisis, told the business forum there was a 50 percent chance of a global double dip recession within the next 12 months.

Calderon said if Roubini was correct, then iron ore and copper markets would clearly be affected, but he said if Europe manages to resolve its debt crisis, then demand and markets would improve.

BHP remained confident that its biggest customer, China, was in a strong position to withstand another global crisis and continue to grow fast, spurred by domestic demand.

"Everything we see points to the fact that China, without doing anything extraordinary, can continue to grow at around 7 to 8 percent," Calderon told the forum.

Vale, the largest of the three top producers, reluctantly discarded the once-a-year-price system in 2010 only after BHP Billiton and Rio bowed out, cognisant it would upset customers. In the end it had no choice but to follow suit.

Now, with spot prices trailing the last quarter's average price mark and lead times on Brazilian cargoes to China much longer than the Australian miners, Vale has announced it is open to alternative pricing systems.

Some analysts have interpreted this as paramount to Vale offering discounted iron ore to boost sales.



© Thomson Reuters 2011 All rights reserved

af.reuters.com



To: kidl who wrote (488)11/27/2011 4:27:50 AM
From: elmatador  Respond to of 2508
 
Vale's ship are built in China. First delivered. No Market? Cancel the rest of the order. Chinese shipyard will suffer.

Rongsheng has a contract to build 12 of the ships by the end of next year, worth as much as $1.6 billion.

Those issues will have to percolate up higher in the Chinese hierarchy so that someone in the upper echelons decide how it should be done.

Why that? Well, because that is Communist China. And one guy trying to protect his shipping sector may hurt someone in the ship building sector.



To: kidl who wrote (488)12/28/2011 9:38:19 AM
From: elmatador  Respond to of 2508
 
Vale’s Giant Iron-Ore Ship Reaches China Port for First Time after the nation’s refusal to allow such vessels delayed by more than six months the Brazilian miner’s plan to control shipments with giant carriers

Vale’s Giant Iron-Ore Ship Reaches China Port for First Time
Dec. 28 (Bloomberg) -- One of the world’s largest commodity ships operated for Vale SA reached a Chinese port for the first time, after the nation’s refusal to allow such vessels delayed by more than six months the Brazilian miner’s plan to control shipments with giant carriers.

The Berge Everest, one of the four vessels BW Group will use to haul iron ore for Vale, has reached the Dalian port fully loaded from Brazil, T.S. Ang, a technical executive at BW Fleet Management in Singapore, the vessel’s owner, said by phone today. He didn’t elaborate as the company is awaiting further details.

Vale is spending at least $8.1 billion on the valemax vessels, including buying 19 very large ore carriers and leasing another 16 in long-term contracts, as it seeks lower freight costs from Brazil to China, its biggest market. The plan has spurred opposition from Chinese shipowners who say it will worsen overcapacity and cause industrywide losses.

BW Group will operate four vessels for Vale, the miner said in 2007. The ship, with a draft of 21.3 meters, is moored outside Dalian, according to data on Bloomberg. The vessel, built by Bohai Shipbuilding Heavy Industry Co., left Brazil in early November, the data showed.

Carolyn Tang, a spokeswoman at Vale China, didn’t answer calls to her office today. A man who said his surname is Wang and is the office secretary of the Dalian port, said he wasn’t aware of the ship.

The Brazilian mining company, the world’s biggest iron ore miner, ships about 45 percent of sales to China, the largest consumer of the steelmaking ingredient.

Vale’s former Chief Executive Officer Roger Agnelli oversaw agreements for the 400,000 deadweight-ton vessels to reduce a reliance on outside shipping lines and risks from changes in freight costs. The Baltic Dry Index, a benchmark for global commodity-shipping rates, fluctuated more than 40 percent on an annual basis every year except one from 2001 to 2010.

The Vale vessels are about twice as big as the capesize ships that are now generally used to ferry commodities from Brazil to China. The miner plans to send about 130 million tons of iron ore on the route both this year and next.

Vale has held talks with Chinese shipping lines about selling or leasing the about 360-meter-long vessels, Teddy Tang, the chief financial officer of its China operations, said in September. No deals had been reached.

The China Shipowners Association, whose members hold about 80 percent of the nation’s shipping capacity, has advised lines not to take the vessels, Executive Vice Chairman Zhang Shouguo has said.

--With assistance from Helen Yuan in Shanghai and Penny Peng and Feiwen Rong in Beijing. Editors: Vipin Nair, Dave McCombs

To contact the reporter on this story: Kyunghee Park in Singapore at kpark3@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Vipin Nair at vnair12@bloomberg.net