An iron ore mining site in Australia Photo: cnsphotos

Despite a flurry of hostile moves against Chinese companies that have chilled relations between China and Australia, Australian iron ore exporters have found their business in China has not been disrupted, which experts say is a reflection of the fact that China is not a country that favors politicizing businesses.

Even though bilateral relations have been shadowed with great uncertainty due to the Australian government's hostility toward China, which include banning Chinese company Huawei from participating in its 5G rollout, Australia's Rio Tinto, the world's second-largest mining conglomerate, has seen a rise in iron ore exports to China in the first half of the year.

The company saw 1.7 million tons of iron ore sales at Chinese ports in the second quarter of 2020, Rio Tinto said in a statement sent to the Global Times Tuesday.

Meanwhile, the company's shipment of iron ore from the Pilbara, Western Australia, increased 3 percent year-on-year in the first six months, reaching 159.6 million tons.

Iron ore shipments from Australia's export hub of Port Hedland to China climbed to a record 46.2 million tons in June, statistics from the country's port authority said on July 10.

Shipments rose by 7 percent from 43.18 million tons in May and were up by 10 percent from the same month last year, the data showed.

"China insists on separating politics and business, while some Western countries are politicizing foreign trade, and bilateral trade with Australia concerns the vital interests of the two peoples," Yu Lei, a chief research fellow at the Research Center for Pacific Island Countries, Liaocheng University, told the Global Times Tuesday.

China is the largest market for most of Rio Tinto's products, including iron ore, copper concentrate and bauxite, with the sales revenue from China contributing to 51.3 percent of its global sales revenue in 2019.

"Given the strong demand for iron ore in China amid China's stellar economic resumption, we expect further growth in export sales," a source with the public relations department of Rio Tinto told the Global Times Tuesday.

China's iron ore imports reached 101.6 million tons in June, up 16.8 percent from 87.03 million tons in May and up 35.3 percent from June last year, according to the latest data released by the General Administration of Customs on July 14. 

China's copper concentrate market remains favorable, while the US market is now very weak, the source said, noting that as China's demand for iron ore will keep going up. In addition to Australia, Brazil's chances of gaining market share in China are also rising. Data from Chinese customs shows that Brazil's iron ore exports to China rose 35 percent in June to 22.77 million tons.
Newspaper headline: Australian iron-ore giant looks to China as driver for growth