Noble loses met coal sales team in Beijing

Trading house Noble has lost its metallurgical coal sales team at its Beijing office, multiple sources told Steel First.

Paragraph entered by Atlantic migration, in order for SteelFirst articles to display correctly on Metal Bulletin.

Tao Huang, gm for met coal China, and Vincent Liu, coking coal marketing manager, left the company earlier this month, according to the sources.

It is unclear what the duo’s next steps are and who their replacements would be. Neither Huang nor Liu could be reached at the time of writing.

Noble declined to comment on the departures.

The company is one of the largest international traders in the met coal market. Its met coal division, led by Tim Gazzard, is headquartered in Singapore.

This is the latest in a series of personnel changes at the Singapore-listed trading house.

Late last year, its former vice-chairman Harindarpal “Harry” Banga launched his own trading firm, Caravel. At least nine people from Noble’s iron ore business in Beijing and Hong Kong are understood to have joined the new venture, including Henrietta Lee, Jim Wong, Nishant Gulati and Isaac Fu.

Rene van der Kam, formerly Noble’s Singapore-based director of base metals, and Julie Zhu, a metal trader at the same office, left the company at the end of last year. They both subsequently joined trading firm Gunvor, with van der Kam now leading its physical base metals business.

Two copper traders in Shanghai left Noble earlier this year.

What to read next
The influential annual treatment and refining charge (TC/RC) benchmark that sets the price that smelters charge miners to process their copper concentrate could be at risk, according to multiple market sources, although most believe the system, or elements of it, will remain
Fastmarkets' initial low-carbon premium for nickel briquettes captured existing regional price differences, with growing awareness and legislative incentives indicating there is potential for a strong market to emerge
The Chilean government is pushing ahead with plans for a new copper smelter despite the global smelting crisis, Chile’s minister of mining, Aurora Williams told Fastmarkets, adding that the state will also play a key role in developing the country’s premium lithium assets
Just under two weeks ago, the chair of BHP made a phone call to his counterpart at mining peer Anglo American and set in motion a flurry of activity designed to create the largest copper producer in the world
Brazilian aluminium supply coming from Companhia Brasileira de Alumínio (CBA) is said to have tightened, helping to boost the P1020A ingot premium, market participants told Fastmarkets in the two weeks to Wednesday April 24
In anticipation of a tight market, copper concentrate traders have locked in 2025 volumes at notably low treatment charges, with deals being placed well below the long-term industry benchmarks