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Rio Tinto’s rewind to 2004 shows it’s a victim of own success

Rio Tinto Group has to work twice as hard to turn the profit it did a decade ago. Back in 2004, the world’s second-biggest mining company produced about 60-million metric tons of iron ore and reported underlying earnings of $1.3-billion in the second half of the year. Now it extracts about 130-million tons in six months for roughly the same profit.