Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Iron Ore cuts jobs at Pilbara iron ore mines

Mining billionaire Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Iron Ore has started cutting hundreds of jobs across its Pilbara empire in a move the company claims will add another decade of life to ageing mines.

It is believed more than 150 roles will go as it cuts back on mining activity at Mrs Rinehart’s flagship Roy Hill operations north of Newman.

The move follows last year’s merger of Roy Hill and Mrs Rinehart’s Atlas Iron under the umbrella of Hancock Iron Ore.

A spokesperson for the company said the decision to reduce the workforce followed a routine operational review.

“Hancock Iron Ore has recently completed its annual life-of-mine planning, identifying opportunities to optimise how ore is mined, processed, and blended across its operations,” the spokesperson said.

“We continuously look at optimising our mine plan and the latest iteration extends our life of mine by 10 years, maximising how much of the orebody we can turn into product and reduce the amount of waste we mine.

“The result is that we need to reduce our mining activity at the Roy Hill mine while still maintaining our production rate above 63 million tonnes a year for the Roy Hill system.”

It was reported staff were notified on an individual basis and offered substantial exit packages.

“We are working through the impact and will work with all affected,” the spokesperson said.

Roy Hill — which is majority owned by Mrs Rinehart, along with a consortium of international steel and trading companies — marked a decade of operation late last year and, according to latest filings, generated a bottom line of $1.8 billion for the 2025 financial year.

That was down almost a half from a record of $3.2b for the 12 months prior amid softer iron ore prices and “challenging” weather conditions.

Atlas Iron suffered a similar profit fall as its three mines grappled with cyclone Zelia in February 2025 and weaker iron ore prices throughout the year. Atlas posted a net profit of $260 million for FY2025, down from $440m.

Australia’s richest person, with an estimated worth of about $38 billion, will be looking to the new $600m McPhee mine north of Roy Hill to extend the life of her Pilbara operations, and is also advancing its Mulga Downs project.

In late 2024, Mrs Rinehart dialled back iron ore processing rates from 20mtpa to 12mtpa at Mulga Downs and reduced the operation’s scale by 48.5 per cent in a bid to appease State regulators.

Mrs Rinehart has previously lamented delays in getting project off the ground due to the “onerous burden of thousands of government approvals and permits, endless regulatory hoops (and) layers of government tape”.

The job cuts come just days after it was revealed Mrs Rinehart had tipped a reported $1.4b into Elon Musk’s huge share market float of space, satellite and AI group SpaceX.

“This is a significant investment for Hancock, and we are pleased to have received an allocation in what has been an extremely popular and oversubscribed IPO,” Mrs Rinehart said on Monday.

“SpaceX’s record speaks for itself. It was the first private company to launch a liquid-fuel rocket to orbit in 2008, the first to dock a private spacecraft with the International Space Station in 2012, and other firsts, and, very critically, through Starlink, the first to begin deploying large-scale LEO broadband satellite constellations in 2019.”

SpaceX shares jumped for a third-straight day overnight Tuesday, overtaking Amazon in value to become the fifth-largest stock in the world.

Shares closed 4.8 per cent higher, pushing its market capitalisation to $US2.65 trillion, roughly $US8 billion higher than Amazon’s.

The gains takes SpaceX shares up 49 per cent from their $US135 initial public offer price.