Ngarmada: "The remaining 90% of iron ore reserves in the world are shared between Australia and Brazil"

Nope.

Here is a selection of the worlds iron ore reserves from the The US Geologic Survey:

Russia: 18%
Australia: 17%
Brazil: 12%
China: 9%

Taken from page 2 of: http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/iron_ore/mcs-2010-feore.pdf The link to that publication is on this page: http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/iron_ore/

My source is an ABC reference. I have rechecked the source and I am advised it is accurate. I have viewed your table, and the only assessment I am able to assume is that Russian ore is unavailable if that data is accurate, although I doubt there would be many difficulties with trade in iron ore between Russia and China.

the question is begged, if the ore in Russia is across the border of China, why are all financial reports on iron ore machinations, concentrated on trade of reserves between China, Australia, and Brazil?

Something does not add up RStuart.

Ngarmada: "Something does not add up RStuart."

You don't provide a link to your reference, but my guess is it says Australia and Brazil control 90% or the words iron ore exports. That might be possible. There isn't much demand for it, as everybody has iron ore in their back yard.

The real measure is how efficiently you can get it out of the ground. Australian's tend to think Australia is very poor at producing and manufacturing things. That is not true. We are hampered by our small population and high wages, but give us a capital intensive industry like mining where those things don't matter so much ... and we do so well we run most of the worlds mining companies.

China beats us at manufacturing most of the time by using their almost limitless pool of very cheap labour. But they don't win at mining. We use machines to dig it out of the ground, and ship it across the ocean for less than it costs the Chinese to put a couple of million peasants to dig the same ore out of the ground by hand.

So it is not like they don't have choices. They do. They are just saying we should not take as much advantage of being so much better equiped, organised, and smarter at getting the ore out of the ground than they are, and instead pass the resultant savings onto them. I don't know about you, but I think keeping the profits of our expertise for ourselves is a much better option.

The point to be remembered, is that iron ore is still dirt cheap.
At around 6c to 10c a kg including shipping, the Chinese should
hardly be complaining. But of course I have yet to see China
not complain about the price of anything which they buy, it is
part of their bargaining strategy, to always want cheaper.

Given that I've just priced an Isuzu 4wd, made in Thailand and it
works out at roughly 40$ a kg, the price of iron ore hardly matters!

There are in fact large reserves of iron ore in Africa too. But as
Rio Tinto is finding, you can invest billions, only to have the Govt
nationalise or expropriate those assets, and you lose the lot.

If the Chinese want huge extra quantities of iron ore, it makes
perfect sense that they pay more, for billions of extra $ have to
be invested, to create that capacity. Wether that costs 6c or 10c
a kg, is hardly a big issue.

As indicated, consensus of reliable leading predictions, project a gradual decline in western economies for a relatively indeterminate period, factored according to the expenditure multiplier ratio. Commodoties prices coincidentally are predicted to decline. Mineral resources are commodities, and there are break even benchmarks even for extensive economies of scale.

For natural resources, as a linear resource, adhere to a principle of demand, that it may be more profitable to consolidate an asset base and leave the resource in the ground, until a time it is more profitable to raise it. Its the 'squirrel' principle. It may be a reason China appears hell bent in its determination to secure iron ore reserves.

However, whichever way you rack up the data, energy sources are observed the prime determinant. Therefore new dynamics and paradigm are observed required for development of sustainable and renewable energy sources. Currently of that requirement, from a management perspective, it may only be globally observed, we are procrastinating over the inevitable.