SHANGHAI — China’s run-of-mine iron ore output rose 14.5 percent to 1.31 billion tonnes last year from a revised 1.14 billion tonnes in 2011, according to National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) data.

"It is widely known that NBS usually revises its data after its first release, but the big gap surprised the market," a Shanghai trader said of the revised 2011 total, originally put at 1.33 billion tonnes.

"We might need to wait for NBS to release the revised data (for 2012) before we do the comparison," an industry analyst in Beijing told AMM sister publication Steel First.

Iron ore output in December rose 14.7 percent from a year earlier to 119.48 million tonnes.

A version of this article was first published by AMM sister publication Steel First.