China’s steel industry is blaming the concentrated ownership of Australia’s iron ore mines for the soaring ore price and is calling for Chinese government intervention.
‘We believe that the supply side is highly concentrated and the market mechanism is not working, so we call for the authorities to play a bigger role in the event of market failure,’ Luo Tiejun, vice president of the China Iron and Steel Association, told an industry conference last week.
The reality is that the market is working well and that the Chinese authorities have much less power to influence it than Luo might imagine.