Showing posts with label Rio Tinto. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rio Tinto. Show all posts

Friday, 11 May 2018

Australian markets pushed to 10-year highs with booming commodity prices

Australian Stock Markets

Booming commodities prices have pushed up Australian mining companies, as well as many smaller miners, leading to the market almost reaching a 10 year high.


But, investors should not be complacent as the performance of the Australian share market will always be on the back end of overseas jitters, in particularly from Wall Street.

Remember February this year when the US market fell 10% in a week, then rallied back more than half of the losses?

The Australian market followed a similar pattern but dropping 12% before recovering some of the losses, and is now back to where it was.

In a year BHP Billiton Limited (ASX: BHP) and Rio Tinto Limited (ASX: RIO) have both risen around 39% and year to date 11% and 9% respectively at the time of writing.

Many smaller miners have seen triple digit rises in share prices, and in some cases are now trading at excessive valuations. The mining index, S&P/ASX 200 Materials (ASX: XMJ) is up 5% year to date and 27% in a year.

Many large miners are on reasonable price-earnings- ratios (PER) relative to the median forward PER of the mining index of 14.6x. BHP is on 14.6x and Rio Tinto, 13x.

The reason for the BHP and Rio Tinto doing so well may also be a result of an unrelated reason.

The Banking Royal Commission may have led to fewer funds going into bank shares, and instead, are being directed to big miners, seen as a “safe” place to put money.

Some miners are even paying a dividend yield with BHP on a current annual yield of 3.8% and Rio paying 4.5%, which are both fully franked.

Other miners that have performed well in a year include South32 Ltd (ASX: S32) up 45%, Alumina Limited (ASX: AWC) up 62% and BlueScope Steel Limited (ASX: BSL) up 52%, at the time of writing.

Monday, 2 October 2017

Rio Tinto on track to go driverless on iron ore trains in 2018

Rio Tinto (RIO.AX) is set to use driverless iron ore trains in Western Australia in 2018, the world No.2 miner of the steelmaking commodity said on Monday after completing its first long-haul journey with a completely autonomous locomotive.
The 100-km (60 mile) run marked a key step towards full commissioning next year of the company’s AutoHaul program, originally slated to start in 2015. 

“This successful pilot run puts us firmly on track to meet our goal of operating the world’s first fully-autonomous, heavy-haul, long-distance rail network,” Rio Tinto iron ore chief Chris Salisbury said in a statement. 

Rio Tinto has long hailed the potential benefits of a driverless rail network, including speeding up journeys from mine to port and back, cutting out time needed for drivers’ shift handovers and eliminating issues with driver fatigue. 

It already runs driverless trucks at its mines, a major contributor to the company’s sharp cut in unit costs over the past five years. 

Delays with the AutoHaul rail plan cut Rio Tinto’s iron ore output in 2016 to 330 million tonnes from an original target of 350 million tonnes. 

The company runs about 200 locomotives on more than 1,700 km of track, hauling ore from 16 mines to four port terminals.