A historical retrospective on Japan’s partnership in Western Australian iron ore projects, contextualising future investment opportunities between partners in emerging markets, technologies and industries.
To the unaware, you would not think there is much connecting Tokyo to a remote corner of the Australian continent 6,900 kilometres away. However, the ochre sands and red-black outcrops of Western Australia’s Pilbara region and the neon lights and steel skyscrapers of Tokyo are directly linked. While the contrast could not be greater, the locations are intrinsically paired – through iron ore. Pilbara iron ore is blasted, mined, crushed and screened at sites such as Mount Whaleback or Rhodes Ridge, transported by cargo train to ports on Western Australia’s coast, including Headland or Dampier, and shipped across the Indian and Pacific oceans to steel mills in Japan where it is blast-furnaced into steel to construct skyscrapers dotted across the Tokyo skyline and the infrastructure that connects it.
Today, Western Australian iron ore product comprises in excess of 50% of Japanese annual iron imports.EN1 But that does not reflect the whole story. The simple sale of iron ore from Western Australia’s natural resource-rich shores to the industry-rich, resource-poor islands of Japan has a long history and deep partnership underpinning it. From importing some of Australia’s earliest seaborn commodities, to navigating a twenty-year total embargo on iron ore export, and eventually underwriting and unlocking Western Australia’s largest iron ore projects, Japan is a constant partner in our iron ore. Japanese investment was, and remains, critical to Western Australia’s iron ore industry, silently founding the export market that continues to fuel the domestic economy today.
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