How China unlocked Guinea's Simandou to reshape the global iron ore trade

World's largest untapped high-grade deposit makes its long-awaited commercial debut

Simandou mine’s projected output of up to annual 120 million tons would make Guinea the world’s fifth-largest iron ore exporter, behind only Australia, Brazil, China and India.

LUO GUOPING, BAO ZHIMING and DENISE JIA, Caixin

November 22, 2025 12:03 JST

On an October morning along the Atlantic coast of West Africa, a bulk carrier named Winning Youth waited quietly in the port of Morebaya. It carried nearly 10,000 metric tons of blood-red earth, freshly extracted from deep inside Guinea's remote southeastern mountains. The iron ore, loaded days earlier onto the first train to run on the Trans-Guinea Railway, had traveled hundreds of kilometers across ridges to reach this point. Soon it would begin an 11,000-nautical-mile (20,372 km) voyage around the Cape of Good Hope, across the Indian Ocean, through the Strait of Malacca and into the South China Sea. Its final destination: a steel mill in China.