The amendments follows positive feedback to the proposal on December 5, 2022 to amend the laycan timing of its coking coal indices to 16-60 days, instead of within 60 days, and to amend the unit of its coking coal indices to wet metric tonne from dry metric tonne, to align with market practice.
Feedback from market participants indicated that cargoes loading within 0-15 days could be deemed too prompt and unrepresentative of spot prices. Amending the laycan timing of its coking coal indices to 16-60 days would enhance the robustness and representativeness of the coking coal indices by excluding prompt laycan cargoes from the calculation of the indices, they said.
Amending the unit to wet metric tonne from dry metric tonne, to better align with market practice will not affect the calculation and functioning of the coking coal indices.
Fastmarkets will also remove the list of brand names that will be included and normalized in each coking coal index from its methodology, following the proposal made on December 5, 2022, to avoid confusion between the list of brands and index quality specifications. This will not affect the calculation of the indices because materials falling within the specification ranges can be included in the calculation and normalized to index base specifications.
The amendment of laycan timing, the unit and the removal of brands will be applied to the following coking coal indices:
- Premium hard coking coal, fob DBCT – MB-COA-0003
- Premium hard coking coal, cfr Jingtang – MB-COA-0005
- Hard coking coal, fob DBCT – MB-COA-0004
- Hard coking coal, cfr Jingtang – MB-COA-0002
- PCI low-vol, fob DBCT – MB-COA-0008
- PCI low-vol, cfr Jingtang – MB-COA-0007
All other chemical and physical specifications will remain unchanged.
The amendments come into effect on Tuesday January 10, 2023.
To provide feedback on these proposals, or if you would like to provide price information by becoming a data submitter to these prices, please email pricing@fastmarkets.com. Please add the subject heading “FAO: Jane Fan/Paul Lim, re: Coking Coal Index specification.”
To see all of Fastmarkets’ pricing methodology and specification documents, go to: https://www.fastmarkets.com/about-us/methodology.
