With commodities prices plunging and resource stocks under huge selling pressure, a consortium of big Japanese and Korean steelmakers is poised for a daring $4 billion (£2.3 billion) swoop on one of Brazil’s largest iron-ore mining companies. The Asian consortium’s ambitious stake-building exercise directly exploits the current market turmoil and offers rare glimmer of opportunity for the world’s largest steelmakers.

The past year has seen the power balance between steelmakers and miners swing decisively to the latter, with the world’s largest iron-ore and coking coal producers able to demand 200% price rises in some of their products when spot markets lurched higher earlier this year.

The seven-strong consortium is understood to include Nippon Steel, JFE Steel, Sumitomo Metal Industries, the Itochu trading house, the South Korean steel giant Posco and several other Japanese smelters.

Sources close to the deal told The Times that the consortium would be seeking to buy a 40% stake in Nacional Minerios — a company that produces around 20 million tons of iron ore each year, or about 10 per cent of total Japanese annual demand.

Analysts said that the deal, which hits the iron-ore producers in the middle of a crisis of confidence in commodities markets and at a moment of extreme share-price weakness, reveals the level of desperation among Asian steelmakers. Shares in mining companies have crumbled over the past two days after Rio Tinto admitted what much of the industry had already guessed — that Chinese demand for iron ore had fallen sharply and that steel-mills were suspending production. The looming prospect of prolonged global recession has done little to stop the plunge in commodity indexes.

Analysts in Tokyo said that the deal could reshape the global resources scene if similar transactions follow in its path. Steelmakers in Japan, South Korea, India and China have all been eager to gain some foothold in the resource supply chain, but have been effectively blocked by the colossal premiums that mining stocks commanded until recently.

Motivating the deal, said one trading company source, is the intense competition for iron ore and coking coal — driven in large part by the voracious appetites of China’s construction industry — that has robbed steelmakers of any serious negotiating strength in the annual price-setting meetings with the miners.

That weakness, and the fear that they would never recover the upper-hand in negotiations, turned to outright terror among Asian steelmakers earlier this year when the prospect of a resource megamerger arose between BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto.

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