JUMP IN IRON ORE EXPORTS
RIO Tinto’s iron ore shipments from Australia rose 14 per cent in the second quarter and the global miner has indicated its annual production would be at the upper end of its guidance.
The miner said it expected iron ore shipments for the year to be at the upper end of its range of 330 million to 340 million tonnes, driven by productivity improvements and fewer weather-related disruptions compared with the same quarter last year.
It had said earlier it did not expect tensions over a global trade war to materially affect steel demand.
Each of the four big iron ore miners were expected to log record production in the second quarter, given a ramp up in China’s steel demand in the quarter, shipbroker Clarksons Platou Securities said.
“Volumes were generally held back a bit in 1Q18, as the Chinese steel complex was weaker (due to) winter production cuts, Chinese New Year, National People’s Congress. As Chinese steel output increased to record levels in 2Q18, iron ore volumes picked up, as well,” Clarksons Platou said in a report.
Rio’s Australian iron ore shipments totalled 88.5 million tonnes in the quarter ended June 30, compared with 77.7 million tonnes a year ago, the company said in a statement.
In a second tweet, he said he bet the claim was true. Mr Unsworth told CNN he was considering legal action.
A Tesla spokeswoman would not comment on the tweets.
For the first four months of the year, Mr Musk was averaging about 100 tweets a month. But the tweets spiked to about 400 a month starting in May as he was under pressure to raise production of the Model 3 lower-priced electric car, which starts at $35,000.
As the spike came, he gained thousands of Twitter followers. He has almost half as many as President Donald Trump, who, likewise, attacks his critics with relish on Twitter.
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UBS had expected iron ore shipments to rise 14 per cent for the quarter, while iron ore prices were flat over the quarter.
Rio Tinto said its mined copper production jumped by 26 per cent due to higher grades at Kennecott and a union strike at Escondida that impaired production in the first half of last year.
The company recently confirmed the sale of its 40 per cent stake in the world’s second-biggest copper mine, Grasberg, for $US3.5 billion to Indonesia’s state mining company PT Inalum and said that it did not expect to record any share of copper production from it this year. Mark Spiegel, who has been betting on Tesla’s stock falling for years, said the tweets show Mr Musk’s fans his true personality. The company, which has had only two profitable quarters, was deep in debt and would have trouble meeting his prediction of a profit in the second half of this year, Mr Spiegel said. “It’s all based around this rabid Elon Musk fan base. Once that fan base starts to see what kind of person they’ve been worshipping, they will turn on you,” he said. Mr Spiegel likened Mr Musk to Mr Trump, saying the two men have an “amazing amount of personality defects in common”. Previous comparisons with Mr Trump have angered Mr Musk. Critic Andrew J. Hawkins recently tweeted that the Tesla chief was transforming into a “mediabaiting Trump figure screaming irrationally about fake news”. Mr Musk responded by lashing out at the media for the Trump comparisons, writing: “Why do you think he got elected in the first place? Because no one believes you any more.” In his defence, he posted on Twitter that leaders of the Thai rescue, in which all the boys and their coach were safely extracted, had asked him to build the mini-sub. Robert Drechsel, who taught media law at the University of Wisconsin, said if he were Tesla’s lawyer, he would advise the CEO to stop tweeting.