Daily iron ore price update (Indian summer)

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Find below the iron ore price table for July 15, 2013:

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An interesting story from India today:

India’s iron ore imports plunged 78 percent in the April to June quarter from a year earlier, according to provisional data from government sources, as domestic supply rose and exports fell.

The shipment data, coupled with a 9.1 percent drop in iron ore imports by top buyer China in June, is expected to drag on global prices of the steel-making raw material that have already shed more than 12 percent so far this year.

India has historically produced enough iron ore to meet its domestic demand, but imports by Asia’s third-largest economy tripled to 3 million tonnes in the year ended March 31 after output from top producing states Karnataka and Odisha fell due to a court-mandated clampdown on illegal mining.

Production has since picked up following steps to clean up the sector of practices such as mining outside allotted areas. A 30 percent duty on exports has also made more iron ore available in the country.

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There is a strong correlation in Chinese port inventories with Indian sourced ore at the moment. The bottom in inventories matched the rise in Indian sourced ore at the end of April. It looks like India is slowly getting out of its own way but only slowly!

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.