Anchors finally away for Chinese Australian mine CITIC Pacific, the Chinese conglomerate, has finally loaded its maiden shipment of iron ore from its Australian venture - four years behind schedule and $8bn over budget. The Sino Iron project in Western Australia was one of a string of Chinese investments designed to break the dominance of the three big iron ore miners: BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto in Australia, and Vale in Brazil. But the state-backed policy was beset by in-fighting and misunderstanding of Australia's labour laws among other problems, and the trio remain the primary suppliers of high-quality, reliable ore to China's bloated steel industry. CITIC Pacific's victory is thus a slender one. Its first shipment of concentrate was loaded onto barges at Cape Preston earlier this week and brought to a ship moored offshore en-route to CITIC Pacific steel mills in the Yangtze Valley, the company said. The A$10bn project will be the world's largest magnetite mine, turning low-grade ore in Australia's Pilbara region into 24m tonnes of concentrate annually. In addition to the mine, the project comprises a desalination plant, the concentrator, a desalination plant and the Cape Preston port. Production costs will continue to be high until the remaining four lines begin operation and economies of scale kick in, said Zhang Jijing, president of CITIC Pacific. Delays in building and commissioning the plant mean that CITIC was not producing iron ore when prices hit a peak of nearly $200 a tonne in early 2011. Had they been active at that time, the additional supply would have done little to depress prices propelled by China's stimulus-fuelled steel demand, analysts said. "They would have been a rounding error ... even then," said Melinda Moore, analyst at Standard Bank in London. CITIC Pacific's Australian adventure has been plagued with other problems. The company wrote off more than $2bn in foreign exchange hedges in 2008, after an unexpected drop in the Australian dollar left it exposed on positions taken to hedge its Pilbara investment. And a long-running dispute over royalty payments with Australian mining magnate Clive Palmer has dogged the Sino Iron development. Mr Palmer sought an injunction against shipments from the port. That failed, as demonstrated by the loaded containers this week. Mr Palmer may be afforded some consolation by his latest project: building a replica of the Titanic at a Shanghai shipyard.