Australian Coking Coal: Prices stay rangebound despite increased demand from China

Australian premium low-volatile hard coking coal prices inched up modestly this week, despite more transactions getting concluded to end users in China.

However, at this juncture, only China has been observing a plethora of trading activities on the back of their bullish metallurgical coke market, while countries like India among other key markets in the Asia-Pacific region remains silent.

The Asian seaborne market has started to trade on spot shipments for Australian premium mid-volatile hard coking coal with deferred laycans, seemingly because the January-loading supply appears to be sold out after a large volume of bookings were done over the past few weeks.

China’s imported coal stocks at ports decline

In China, aggregate stocks of imported coking coal at five major ports dropped by 230,000 tonnes or 3% week-on-week to 6.7 million tonnes as of December 12, according to data published by Mysteel, a China-centric insight and global metal markets intelligence providing company.

These five Chinese ports comprise North China’s Jingtang, East China’s Qingdao, Rizhao and Lianyungang, and South China’s Zhanjiang ports.

Notably, foreign coking coal stocks at Jingtang port declined by 150,000 tonnes or 4% week-on-week to reach a 12-week low of 3.5 million tonnes. Jingtang port is located in Hebei province’s Tangshan, China’s largest steelmaking city.

Nevertheless, the stocks will possibly rise soon, assuming that more China-bound seaborne coking coal cargoes from Australia are scheduled to arrive in January 2020 — to avoid the tighter customs clearance procedures in place at several ports this month.

PRICE ASSESSMENTS

Latest offers for the Premium HCC grade are assessed at around USD 136.00/MT FOB Australia, higher by USD 0.37/MT than the average rate of USD 135.63/MT prevailing during the week gone by (9th – 13th Dec’19).

Offers for the 64 Mid Vol HCC grade are assessed at around USD 121.45/MT FOB Australia.

For Indian buyers, the above offers amount to USD 150.45/MT and USD 135.90/MT respectively on CNF India basis.

Pulverized Coal Injection (PCI) & Semi Soft Coking Coal

N.B.: All prices are in USD/MT