Iron ore price, page-198

Very interesting question - you'd have some war stories to tell.

Going back a decade or so no-one outside of Rio put much store in value on Simandou. It then featured prominently during Rio's defence if BHP.

I suspect Rio held Janusian (simultaneously different) views of Simandou, on one hand senior execs had promised huge value to their investors, they put an A grade team on the project, invested more than 1B and the resource is truly remarkable. On the other hand the capital was/is huge, the UK corruption act is a massive deal to handle, Africa is hard full-stop, and the inevitable question of cannibalising the Pilbara base comes up.

You would know better than me but in the end I think a go slow approach made sense for Rio, they weren't going to build it, but neither was anyone else.

I think now Chinalco will develop Simandou as their strategic intent and ability to operate in Africa are very different to Rio's. The current producers are likely to regret Rios exit.

On (2) some years back I plugged all of SDLs public (ie optimistic) assumptions into a DCF model - and still couldn't make it get close to their market cap at the time. It was a boom time project that doesn't work even in a boom. Perhaps 60-100+ years away and even then may be displayed by a better Pilbara/Iron Quadrangle replacement.

Your view?