Andy Xie: Iron ore miners going to bust

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From Bloomie:

Iron ore bear Andy Xie is sticking to his guns.

…“The steel industry is reaching a critical point,” said Xie, a former Asia-Pacific chief economist at Morgan Stanley. “They’ll have to cut production,” said Xie, who forecast in February — when iron ore was in the $60s — that prices would drop below $40 this year. It ended at $44.91 last week, the lowest since July.

…“The four of them, their production costs are all in the teens,” he said by phone on Friday. “A lot of the marginal producers, the new guys, have to exit. I expect major bankruptcies in this industry. All these guys coming out to say ‘It’s not so bad, it’s improving.’ These guys are still hanging on. They’re going to go under, you know. They’ll go bust.”

There will be only three non-Chinese major producers in the future.

About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.