Brazilian mining and metals giant Vale said on Friday its price talks with China will not affect iron ore exports to that nation, after the company unexpectedly decided to renegotiate its contracts with Asian clients.
“If iron ore shipments to China should stop, China’s steel industry would come to a standstill,” Vale president Roger Agnelli told reporters seeking his comments on rumors that China had decided to cancel iron ore imports from Brazil.
Agnelli said there was no problem with his company’s trade with China and that iron ore exports to the Asian giant were continuing as normal.
The world’s top iron ore producer, Vale mostly exports the mineral to China and sets its price annually, through negotiations at the start of the year.
However, Vale on Sept. 9 broke tradition by announcing it was “renegotiating the price of iron ore with our Asian clients to bring it in line with our European clients, due to the drop in shipping costs.”
Agnelli said Vale’s iron ore prices for Asian clients were 11.5 percent lower than Europe’s.
“It’s an issue that’s going to be negotiated, but in reality the Chinese will not see a rise [in prices]. The lower shipping costs between Brazil and China will offset the higher price of iron,” Agnelli said.
“The Chinese are complaining, but the final price will be the same,” he said, adding that Vale’s production facilities were operating at full capacity and he saw no signs demand was dropping.
Meanwhile, China Steel Corp (中鋼), Taiwan’s largest maker of the metal, will continue to operate its mills at 100 percent of capacity to meet strong local demand, vice president Kao Tong-seng (高東生) said.
The steelmaker won’t cut output and will support mills that rejected Vale’s demand for the raw material iron ore, Kao said in Shanghai yesterday.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
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Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
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