RE: Iron prices11 Sep 2016 22:11
Hi granto,
Thank you for your previous post, you have clearly put more effort into researching this company than I have.
I think I have been a tad complacent recently.
I have perhaps over-simplisticly, assumed that current iron prices are at or close to their long term average/sustainable level and that this will generate 20p - 30p EPS going forward and therefore FXPO could trade at any PE ratio on that, upto about 10 without looking obviously over priced.
About a year ago i made a reasonable attempt to read the annual report available at the time, and failed to find sufficient confidence to invest significantly. Iron was falling significantly and the banking thing was going on, but additionally i struggled with understanding the business, its product(s?) and its industry.
I had not realised that china was responding (industry policywise) to green issues or that pelletised iron ore is a relatively non-polluting product to the other alternatives, prior to reading your post and skim reading some "google-stuff" later on.
In particular though, the pellet premium has been a bit of a mystery to me. i understand that pelletising is a process requiring capital investment in plant capacity, production time and running costs and that globally, pelletisation capacity is more constrained than that for normal iron ore produce (lump? ... fines??).
I thought initially, that the pellet premium was just a percentage put on top of the base iron ore price and therefore liable to rise and fall with it, but perhaps it is best viewed as an independant component of the product with an intrinsic/absolute value of its own?
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