He described the high operating costs experienced by the business as “unique” and remained confident the company was on track for medium-term growth.

“The combination of high exchange rate, high cost and high energy costs which we've got in Australia at the moment is a pretty unique set of circumstances,” he told the ABC Inside Business program.

"The rate of growth in China may have slowed down a bit [but] China's economy is very definitely still growing and growing at the highest rate of the major economies in the world.

"We believe that while the absolute demand growth for products is going to be lower than we've seen in some recent years, we still believe there are very attractive opportunities for our company and indeed for Australia."

While revenues were steady for metallurgical coal at $7.5 billion for the year to June 2012, earnings before interest and tax plunged by 41% to $1.5 billion.

The company said higher costs, excluding the impacts of inflation, exchange rate volatility and non-cash items, reduced underlying EBIT for the entire BHP Billiton group by $2.7 billion in the 2012 financial year.

BHP will shelve its planned 2.5 million tonne per annum expansion of the Peak Downs mine in Queensland but will continue with the $US2.1 billion Caval Ridge project as it seeks to ramp up overall production by 50% by 2014.

"In reality what we are talking about is just slowing the rate of [capital expenditure] growth going forward," Kloppers said.