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
Asian spot copper premiums rose in the week ended Tuesday July 23, with premiums imported into China increasing on improved arbitrage terms. In the US market, supply failed to keep up with strong demand while in Europe participants were mostly off for the summer holidays
In the fourth episode of Fastmarkets critical minerals podcast Fast Forward, Freeport-McMoRan CEO and president Kathleen Quirk tells host Andrea Hotter why there's a preference to build and not build new supplies of copper right now
Demand for primary aluminium from the green transition remains a “brighter spot” for consumption amid an otherwise challenging downstream demand outlook, Eivind Kallevik, Norsk Hydro’s chief executive officer and president, told Fastmarkets in an exclusive interview on Tuesday July 23
Acquisition Company Limited (ACG) has agreed to buy the Gediktepe mine in Turkey — the company’s first deal as it works to build a sizeable mid-tier copper producer, its chairman and chief executive officer told Fastmarkets.
Copper market price speculation is driving the base metals narrative, head of research at UK-based services provider Sucden Financial Daria Efanova said during the company’s third-quarter metals webinar on Wednesday July 17.
Chinese mining giant CMOC reported a 178% year-on-year increase in cobalt metal production for the first six months of 2024, according to an announcement by the company on Friday July 12