Rio Tinto breaks WA iron ore quarterly shipment record to win ‘tightly balanced’ 2025 guidance race

WA’s iron ore machine is firing on all cylinders, led by Rio Tinto breaking its quarterly shipment record to win a “tightly balanced” race and BHP accelerating output despite a tiff with China.

December quarter export data obtained by The West Australian highlights a strong end to 2025 for the two main Pilbara iron ore empires.

The data generally varies by up to 0.5 per cent from the numbers that will be reported by the companies later this month.

Rio shipped an estimated 90.8 million tonnes for the December quarter, edging out its previous quarterly record of 90mt in 2017.

The bumper end to 2025 took Rio’s full-year total to about 326mt, meeting guidance of between 323mt and 338mt.

Rio’s target band looked out of reach for most of the year after multiple cyclones wiped out 13mt during the March quarter.

The Anglo-Australian miner in October stated it would need a “strong” December quarter just to deliver on the lowest end of its forecast.

“A strong Q4 performance is required as the system remains tightly balanced and has limited ability to mitigate further losses,” Rio said at the time.

Rio clinching victory from the jaws of defeat at its most lucrative division gives the mining goliath a shot in the arm amid negotiations with Glencore that could end in a $300 billion-plus merger deal.

BHP’s WA iron ore unit also capped off 2025 with a strong result, despite a tense standoff between the Big Australian and Beijing’s state-run iron ore buyer — China Mineral Resources Group.

Reports emerged on September 30 — a day before the start of the December quarter — that CRMG ordered domestic traders to temporarily stop purchasing WA cargoes from BHP.

The vast majority of the iron ore that BHP and its WA peers produce is sold to Chinese steel mills.

CMRG apparently wants big discounts on BHP’s spot cargo and a large portion of sales settled in Chinese yuan instead of the US dollar. Negotiations between BHP and CMRG are still ongoing.

Any supposed threats did not deter BHP from dispatching hundreds of bulk carriers laden with its iron ore.

BHP shipped 76.2mt from its Port Hedland export hub during the December quarter, up 3.1mt from the same period a year prior and eclipsing the previous December quarter record of 74.8mt set in 2022.

Its all-time quarterly high of 77.5mt was set in the most recent June quarter. BHP followed the record result with a sluggish 70.2mt September quarter when it had to rebuild a rail car dumper as part of planned maintenance.

Meanwhile, December quarter shipments from Andrew Forrest’s Fortescue rose year-on-year from 49.4mt to 50.9mt.

FMG is on track to hit the midpoint of its 195mt to 205mt guidance for the 2026 financial year, having exported about 49.7mt during the December quarter.

FMG, like BHP, achieved its shipment record of 55.2mt in the June 2025 quarter.

MinRes also remains on track to reach its FY2026 shipping forecast of between 30 million wet metric tonnes and 33mwmt from its flagship Onslow Iron, which hit nameplate capacity in October.

The Chris Ellison-led MinRes pumped out 8.5mwmt from Onslow during the final three months of 2025, down marginally from 8.6mwmt in the September quarter.

It had an aggregate of 2.2mt from its other Pilbara iron ore mines for the December quarter, with about 2.7mt shipped from those mines during the three months prior. Guidance for FY2026 is between 9mt and 10mt.