Iron ore price, page-39372

I dont think the graphs showed up. Trying again. Hopefully the graphs work this time.

The price of iron ore is driven by supply and demand. Demand is driven by the Chinese Steel Mills. Here is a graph showing Chinese steel production going back a decade as published by the World Steel Association. Most iron ore comes from Australia. The baseload iron ore production is from Australia and Brazil. Swing production (expensive production that gets turned on and off) comes out of India and China mostly.
About 10 years ago the Pilbara expansions were largely completed. At that point there was a sustained period of low IO pricing while the low cost producers went into mothballs. Prior to that most world production IO production came out of China now Australia and Brazil dominate.
The 2nd graph below shows this. You can see how much Chinese IO production reduced between 2010 and 2020.
The combination of these supply and demand effects is what sets the price.