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Gina Rinehart’s flagship Roy Hill iron ore mine in the Pilbara has lifted the billionaire’s mining dividends for the past year over $2.5 billion.

A day after her Atlas Iron revealed a lower annual profit on the back of weaker iron ore prices, Roy Hill Holdings has followed suit by disclosing a 28 per cent earnings fall to $3.2b for the 2021-22 financial year.

However, the company still returned $3.3b of dividends for the 12-month period to its shareholders, with Mrs Rinehart’s 70 per cent owner Hancock Prospecting pocketing the lion’s share of $2.3b.

The payout increases the billionaire’s total dividend from mining for the past year to more than $2.5b, including the $225 million dividend announced by Atlas Iron on Monday.

Roy Hill’s reduced profit mirrors financial results at its bigger rivals, Rio Tinto, BHP and Fortescue Metals Group, which have all reported lower annual iron ore revenues after the steel-making ingredient came off its record highs in 2021 above $US230 a tonne.
Nonetheless, the commodity remains a lucrative money-maker where miners can bring scale to bear on costs.

Roy Hill, whose owners include Japan’s Marubeni (15 per cent), South Korean giant POSCO (12.5 per cent) and China Steel (2.5 per cent), shipped record volumes of more than 60 million tonnes for the year to June 30.

The company said in a statement on Tuesday its results marked “a strong financial performance, despite lower prices for iron ore”, noting the weaker profit still 43 per cent up on its return for the 2019-20 financial year “Cash flow from operations was $4b for the financial year, enabling Roy Hill to pay a total of $3.3b in dividend payments to its equity partners,” it said.

Roy Hill chief executive Gerhard Veldsman said the record production was aided by “the integration of our planning, scheduling, and mine execution teams, along with a shift to a more strategic planning model”.

Over the year, Roy Hill committed $683m in new capital, including the purchase of the Pilbara’s first battery-powered locomotive, scheduled for delivery in 2023.

Mrs Rinehart used the Roy Hill announcement to again voice her opposition to the Federal Government’s new industrial relations legislation.

“Productivity improvements remain the only sustainable way of being able to improve real wages, rather than regressive industrial relations changes which put further investment and new projects at risk and importantly risk negatively impacting the positive relationship between employers and employees,” she said.