Brazil’s mining enterprise Vale has reported a whopping loss of $12.1 billion for 2015 in what appears to have been mainly prompted as a result of low prices of iron ore. 

Other key factors that were involved in the loss of the world’s third largest producer of iron ore have been specified as the sharp depreciation of the real and a mining accident that killed 19 people.

In 2014, Vale had posted a profit of $657 million, but last year the Brazilian currency fell 47 percent against the dollar, inflating the company's debt, while revenue declined and the price of iron ore -- Vale's main export product -- dropped 43 percent, the media have quoted the company’s finance director Luciano Siani as saying.

Losses in the fourth quarter of last year widened to $8.6 billion from $2.1 billion during the same three months a year earlier while operating revenue also dropped, to just under $6 billion from $6.6 billion during the fourth quarter of 2014, the Financial Times reported. Revenues for the whole of 2014 fell sharply to $26 billion from $38 billion in 2014, it added.

Vale, like many of its rivals, has been cutting costs in a bid to weather the commodities price storm.

The group said its costs and expenses were cut to $22.9 billion last year from $29 billion the previous year.

Part of that reduction was down to exchange rate variations, the company admitted, although its own cost savings efforts wiped $1.8 billion off its total costs bill, the FT added.