iron ore miner margins, page-110

India's Second Largest Iron-Ore Miner Halts All Activity

Today, however, even more mining capacity was taken offline, as India's Goa, the country's second largest iron ore producer, announced it was temporarily ceasing all mining activity "after an expert panel formed by the central government found "serious illegalities and irregularities" in mining operations."
It remains to be seen if Goa going dark will push iron-ore prices higher. It is quite likely that the collapse in Chinese iron-ore demand offline is far greater than anything Goa will remove from the market and as such will hardly push iron prices higher.

Goa is India's second-biggest iron ore producer. It produces more than 50 million tonnes of iron ore annually and exports almost all of it, making it the top exporter. Sesa Goa Ltd (SESA.NS), an Indian unit of London-listed Vedanta Resources Plc, gets most of its iron ore from mines based in Goa.



The mining-suspension order came a week after the Supreme Court partially allowed mining in the neighbouring Karnataka following a ban of more than a year.



India used to be the world's No. 3 iron ore exporter, with most of its product heading to China. But a clampdown on illegal mining in 2010, and New Delhi's measures to keep output for domestic steel mills, slashed exports in half.