Fastmarkets indices
Premium hard coking coal, fob DBCT: $132.84 per tonne, down $2.28 per tonne
Premium hard coking coal, cfr Jingtang: $141.15 per tonne, down $3.95 per tonne
Hard coking coal, fob DBCT: $111.02 per tonne, unchanged
Hard coking coal, cfr Jingtang: $121.01 per tonne, down $0.44 per tonne
No transactions were heard on Friday October 9.
The majority of the state-owned steel mills in China were verbally notified of the import restriction in late September and before the Chinese market went on Golden Week holiday on October 1, sources told Fastmarkets on their return to the market.
A trader had been offering an October-laycan cargo of premium low-vol hard coking coal at $142 per tonne cfr China recently, a trader source from China told Fastmarkets.
Seaborne premium hard coking coal prices will be under pressure if state-owned steel mills cannot import Australian coking coal, the trader added.
A second trader source from the country believes that the premium mid-vol hard coking coal price will be more resilient than that of premium low-vol hard coking coal.
“For one thing, ex-China markets such as India have the demand for premium mid-vol material. For another, premium mid-vol hard coking coal is more widely-used than premium low-vol material because the former can be used by both large and small-size furnaces while the latter can only be used by large-size ones,” the second trader explained.
Dalian Commodity Exchange
The most-traded January coking coal futures contract closed at 1,321 yuan ($194.48) per tonne on Friday, up by 49.50 yuan per tonne.
The most-traded January coke contract closed at 2,080.50 yuan per tonne, up by 93.50 yuan per tonne.
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