Australia, the world's largest shipper of the raw commodity iron ore, has earmarked an iron ore export projection of 473 million tonnes in the year to June 2012, up by nearly 3 per cent from an earlier forecast of 460 million tonnes, even as it forecast that prices of the raw commodity used to make steel will decline 8.5 per cent this year.

On Wednesday, Australia's Bureau of Resources and Energy Economics said iron ore prices may average at only $140 a metric tonne in 2012 compared from $153 a metric tonne in 2011. It may slide down further depending on the economic movements in its biggest market, China.

"Over the remainder of 2012, iron ore prices are forecast to ease as production increases from new projects in Australia and growth in Asian steel production weakens," the bureau said. "Further price decreases are expected to be limited by an expected reduction in exports from India."

Big iron miners remained confident on a soft landing for China even as the world's second largest economy reduced its own economic growth target to an eight-year low of 7.5 per cent for this year. In fact, miners continued to work on longer-term iron ore output expansion plans.

BHP Billiton, Rio Tino, and Fortescue Metals, Australia's three biggest iron ore producers, all have pending large-scale plans to enhance production at their respective mines in Western Australia. BHP Billiton looks to increase output from 165m tonnes to 350m tonnes in the Pilbara iron belt by 2020. The same goes for Rio, albeit in a shorter timeframe.

"Nobody's saying that demand growth in China for iron ore is going to go away, just that growth rates will not be as high as they were," Mike Young, managing director of BC Iron, said in The London South East. BC Iron relies all of its revenues on iron sales to China.

"We don't expect conditions to revert to pre-2003 levels but we do expect a persistent slowdown in the foreseeable future," Laura Brooks, a consultant for the steel-making raw materials unit of commodities market analysts CRU, said in a conference in Perth.

"We don't see this as a negative, just maybe a less positive," Young said.

On Tuesday, global mining, oil and gas company BHP Billiton revealed China's iron ore demand was "flattening."

"We don't expect change straight away but we do expect the main transition to be post-2015 and the transition to be complete by the 2020s," Brooks said.