CMRG

China Mineral Resources Group (CMRG) was established in July 2022 and is a central state-owned enterprise. One of its roles is that of an “iron ore purchasing agent”: the long-term contract purchase volumes of imported ore for China’s leading state-owned and private steel mills are currently handled centrally by CMRG, while spot purchases are left to the companies themselves. More than 80% of China’s iron ore demand is met by imports; in 2025 China imported 1.259 billion tonnes of iron ore, worth US$123.05 billion.

CMRG conducts annual long-term iron ore contract negotiations separately with each of the “Big Four” miners. CMRG’s annual long-term contract tussle with BHP escalated from September 2025, and negotiations originally scheduled to conclude that month remained unresolved after many subsequent rounds. In early to mid-April 2026, BHP executives visited China and made intensive visits to CMRG, steel mills and other Chinese partner companies; according to Caixin, during this period CMRG was also restricting domestic steel mills and traders from buying BHP iron ore.

On April 22, 2026, BHP announced in its quarterly operational review that it had completed negotiations with CMRG on iron ore sales contracts. According to Caixin, the two sides reached a preliminary agreement in mid-April, and downstream companies began reporting their May demand for BHP long-term contract volumes to CMRG. The most important change in the outcome was that renminbi-denominated spot indices were incorporated into long-term contract pricing, including the iron ore port spot price index published by the Beijing Iron Ore Trading Center (the “BIOTC index”), raising the overall weight of domestic index providers as pricing references; the long-term contracts negotiated by CMRG as agent specify purchase volumes, while prices are set according to iron ore price indices. This made BHP the first of the “Big Four” miners to use the BIOTC index in long-term contracts.

According to Caixin, in BHP’s new-year long-term contracts, Jimblebar fines will incorporate renminbi spot indices and be priced using four indices in total: renminbi spot indices accounting for a combined 51%, comprising the BIOTC index and the Mysteel port spot index, both converted into US dollars; the other 49% consists of the Mysteel US dollar index and the Argus US dollar index. Jimblebar fines are produced in Australia and mainly supplied to China; in fiscal year 2025 BHP produced 67.38 million tonnes of Jimblebar fines, a quarter of its iron ore output that year, which on that basis amounts to about 5.4% of China’s total imports in 2025. BHP’s other iron ore products will not incorporate renminbi spot indices and will be priced overall using blended US dollar-denominated indices; none of the iron ore products in these long-term contracts will be priced using the Platts index any longer.

Another major change in this BHP long-term contract was larger price discounts. According to Caixin, BHP offers a 1.8% discount to the large customers represented by CMRG in the negotiations, plus large-vessel incentives and freight rebates; the 1.8% discount is similar in nature to a rebate and is returned after the annual contract has been fully performed, considerably higher than the price rebates that may have existed in earlier long-term contracts.

The BIOTC index was launched on September 28, 2025. It is based on renminbi-denominated port spot transactions on the Beijing Iron Ore Trading Center platform, converted into US dollars, and reflects the price of 61% grade iron ore at the two ports of Qingdao and Caofeidian. The Beijing Iron Ore Trading Center began operating on May 8, 2012, and is China’s first Sino-foreign joint-stock iron ore spot trading venue; its shareholders include the China Iron and Steel Association, CMRG, Baosteel, HBIS, Ansteel, Shougang, Minmetals, CITIC and the “Big Four” miners.

CMRG and other companies are actively promoting the BIOTC index. A CMRG executive said at the China Mining Conference held at the end of October 2025 that the BIOTC index is formed from a large volume of real transactions, better reflects genuine market demand and represents an optimisation of the pricing mechanism; the executive has also expressed dissatisfaction with Platts index pricing, arguing that it uses prices from a small sample of trades to determine the prices of all trades in the following month, which is neither fair nor reasonable. By early February 2026, the Beijing Iron Ore Trading Center had signed index application memoranda with 24 core companies in the industry chain; in the same month the BIOTC index was used for the first time in long-term pricing of domestic iron ore, when Shanghai Delong Steel Group and Liaoning Shougang Boron Iron Co., Ltd. signed an annual long-term contract for the purchase of about 150,000 tonnes of domestic iron ore, with settlement based on the monthly average of the BIOTC index. According to Caixin, CMRG is seeking to reduce the use of the Platts index.