Iron ore price, page-31044

The bottom excerpt from the article is key to keeping i/o at +$100/t

"In any commodity market, the price is dictated by the highest-cost or marginal supplier. After making allowance for quality and transport, all suppliers of a commodity get the same price in an open market, regardless of what it costs to produce. So, the highest-cost producer is the one that would stop mining if the price were to fall, leaving the market short of supply.

In the iron ore market, the highest-cost producers are all Chinese. China normally takes around 70% of the seaborne trade in iron ore, or around 1 billion tonnes, but it relies on domestic production for a further 900 million tonnes.

However, around three-quarters of China’s domestic production needs a price of at least US$100 a tonne in order to operate, with some mines having much higher break-even thresholds than that. China’s iron ore reserves are low quality and require expensive heat treatment before they can be fed into steel mills. Production peaked at 1.5 billion tonnes in 2015, but has fallen because of the sector’s poor economics and government efforts to stop shallow strip mining, which is environmentally damaging."