China's Jinling Mining hiked its iron ore concentrate production in 2013 to 1.23 million mt, up 6.9% year on year in 2013, the Shenzhen-listed company said in its financial report released Tuesday.

Jinling, one of the few Chinese iron ore miners listed on domestic stock exchanges, has mining operations in Shandong province. It also produced 301,060 mt of pellet at its plant that began trial output in April last year in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. The miner said it hopes to ramp up to full capacity this year. Handan Steel in northern China's Hebei province was Jinling's top iron ore customer accounting for nearly one-fifth of the miner's sales revenue in 2013.

Jinling also produced last year 1,496 mt of copper, up 42.9% year on year, and 68 mt of cobalt, which was 13.3% higher from 2012.

State-owned Jinling, headquartered in Zibo city, Shandong, has a crude iron ore production capacity of 3.5 million mt/year and concentrate output capacity of 1.5 million mt/year. Its sole pelletizing plant has a production capacity of about 500,000 mt/year.

China's domestic iron ore mining sector is spread out all over the country with over 4,000 producers. Only less than 10 of them boast crude iron ore capacity of more than 10 million mt/year.

The Shandong miner did not release its iron ore output and sales targets for 2014. Company officials would not comment on this, but the company did say that it expected the iron ore market situation to become worse in 2014, echoing what other market sources have been saying.

Iron ore prices were likely to stay low amid continuing challenges faced by steel mills due to a slowing economy, steel overcapacity, high production costs and weak domestic steel prices, the company said. Jinling posted a 23.7% year-on-year rise in net profit for 2013 to Yuan 261.7 million ($42.5 million).