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
Copper’s long-term outlook is constrained by the industry’s limited ability to bring new supply online fast enough to meet rising demand, with permitting delays, higher capital costs and policy risks slowing project development, industry executives said at the FT Commodities Global Summit on Wednesday April 22.
Capital is flowing back into junior mining, but selectively. Investment is increasingly favouring development‑stage assets with clearer paths to production, supported by government funding and strategic partnerships. While demand for critical minerals underpins the cycle, early‑stage explorers continue to struggle for capital as investors prioritise discipline, ESG alignment and near‑term cash flow.
Copper in concentrate production from Ivanhoe Mines' Kamoa-Kakula complex in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) fell to 61,906 tonnes in the first quarter, down by 54% from 133,120 tonnes a year earlier, with the company now evaluating local third-party concentrate purchases to advance the ramp-up of its on-site smelter, according to an April 13 production release as the market focused its attention on the impact of global sulfuric acid shortages during CESCO Week in Chile from April 13-17.
China's planned sulfuric acid export ban from May 1, historic lows for copper concentrates treatment and refining charges (TC/RCs) and a fragmenting 2026 benchmark system dominated CESCO Week 2026 in Santiago from April 13-17.
The proposal would align the index more closely with physically traded volumes in the region, and enable it to adjust to evolving market conditions. This proposal follows an observed widening of the spread between trader and smelter purchase components of the index and is aligned with a majority of market feedback. Additionally, Fastmarkets seeks feedback […]
Until now, aluminium has been hard to move, not hard to find. Global aluminium supply had remained technically intact, even as output was curtailed in parts of the Gulf, inventory buffers were drawn down or repositioned, and shipping through the Strait of Hormuz was severely disrupted.