Andrew Wong and Carlos de Alba want to get more details on the iron ore sales. Paul Volant's reply is totally evasive and useless. Paulo Misk also avoids providing quantitative details. His reply is long and as usual difficult to follow. Through his “winding” answer we can tell that they were surprised that the content of sodium in our iron ore was unacceptable by the Chinese (???). They thought that they could easily sell something that has been classified as solid waste by our lab (???).
Q2 CC transcript
Andrew Wong
No. I think that helps answer the question. Maybe just a little bit on the quarter. It looks like there was a little bit of iron ore sales this quarter. Can you talk about the volumes associated with those sales and what we can expect going forward? Thank you.
Ian Robertson
Paolo, is that something you want to jump in and handle or Paul?
Paulo Misk
Yes. I think - Paul, you there?
Paul Vollant
Yes, I'm here, hi Andrew.
Paulo Misk
Okay. Take it.
Paul Vollant
Yes. Andrew, we sold limited amount of iron ore this quarter. We had to deliver many sample and trial quantities to various customers in Brazil and outside of Brazil. We're definitely expecting to run that up depending on market condition. As you know, iron ore prices have been quite volatile over the past 6 months. But given prices and market remain as strong as it is today, we're going to continue and increase the sale of this commodity.
Operator
Your next question comes from Carlos De Alba from Morgan Stanley.
Carlos De Alba
So if I may, could you be a little bit more specific on the iron ore outlook for volumes, please? I mean, at this point, you must probably know how much the byproducts from your operations are going to be and given that a lot of investors got quite excited last quarter on this alternative or complementary revenue stream, it will be appreciated if you can be a little bit more detail on your answer on that. …
Paulo Misk
Yes. Thank you Carlos for your question. Carlos, we have been trying to sell the iron ore we did huge efforts. Paul, myself, have been reaching many companies in Brazil and firstly, initially, we thought that our high-grade of titanium and so do iron ore, it will be just a matter of diluting them. If we plan, let's say, 10% of our material all the containments we adjust to the specification and that's it, it can be accepted in any place, especially in China. That was our thought and when we disclosed the first sales, it was a big amount. And we thought that's going to continue in a very big way as we have huge producers and exporters of iron ore.
So the amount of iron ore that we would like to sell, it's almost nothing compared to the amount of all the big companies in Brazil are selling to China. However, when this material reached China, they - not titanium, titanium was okay because there is others iron ores with high titanium especially in China. So they are not - they didn't bother about this, but they really concerned about the sodium. Sodium is not an element, a material naturally in the iron ore, titanium has potassium like some iron ore from Chile, but not sodium. So the customers are not accepting higher sodium or even low, even below specification. And so they are not accepting to have sodium in their material. They are complaining. For that reason, this blending strategy didn't work. We try to sell our materials directly to China.
However, the lab has been classified as a solid waste, which is the reality. So somehow, which we think it will be easy to sell, considering the high price. We have been giving some discount. But it's not that easy. Maybe some specific customer if we find them but to be frank, I will not count to sell the iron ore this year going forward. We'll keep trying. We will be looking for not a strategy, which will be developed a process to produce the big iron at sites and recover the titanium slag and vanadium slag and feed them into our production. So we didn't give up but selling iron ore, I don't think it will be the case.