Miners shift focus to stay in game

The latest production reports by Anglo-Australian mining giants BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto show just how much the commodity market has changed over the past year.

BHP and Rio's quarterly statements underline that mining is now a game of producing the highest volumes at the lowest costs, while at the same time scaling back on spending.

This seems like a logical response to concerns over slowing demand growth from top consumer China, whose appetite for commodities drove a decade-long boom in developing projects to boost supply.

The jury is still out on whether the major mining firms stopped spending in time to avoid a major bust in commodity prices or whether new supply still in the pipeline will deliver a crashing end to the China-led boom.

Certainly both BHP and Rio made much of their efforts to boost volumes at lower costs, while scaling back capital expenditure.

This shift in emphasis came about in the middle of last year when both companies abruptly changed direction from spending massively to boost supplies to curbing costs, selling non-core assets and running existing operations harder.