Major mining company to cut 1,000 jobs

Mining giant Mineral Resources will shut down its iron ore operations in the Goldfields region of Western Australia, with around 1,000 workers to lose their jobs. 

Billionaire MinRes founder Chris Ellison said the Yilgarn hub, which consists of about five mine sites to the east of Perth, would not be financially viable from next year. 

On top of site workers, the shutdown of the 13-year-old Yilgarn hub is expected to affect wider contractors and suppliers. 

Mr Ellison said this week that MinRes, worth about $12billion, expects to ship four million tonnes of iron ore from Yilgarn over the next six months and will then put the sites into rehabilitation from 2025. 

Mr Ellison said in an ASX statement the ‘prudent’ decision was ‘not taken lightly’ and that MinRes would attempt to redeploy workers to other mine sites or processing facilities. 

He said the decision was based on dwindling resources at current mine sites and the length of time it would take to develop new sites in the area.

‘With our investment across Western Australia, we have almost 800 vacancies and will redeploy as many of our people as possible to other MinRes operations, including to our low-cost, long-life Onslow Iron project,’ he said.

MinRes has been expanding its iron ore projects in the Pilbara region in WA’s north, which includes Onslow.

This week a worker died at the Onslow Iron site in an incident under investigation by mining safety authorities. 

Last month MinRes sent its first shipment from the Pilbara to China’s Baowu Group, the world’s biggest steelmaker.

Last week it spent about $72million to purchase Pilbara iron ore assets from the Kerry Stokes-backed BCI Minerals.

By June 2025, Onslow is expected to export 35million tonnes of iron ore a year, dwarfing Yilgarn’s output of about eight million tonnes a year.