Indonesia and Australia dominate the global seaborne coal trade. Indonesia dominates the thermal coal market, while Australia is the largest exporter of coking coal and the second-largest supplier of thermal coal; coking coal is the raw material for the production of steel.
China is the world's largest coal importer, followed by India.
China's main coal supplier in Australia, but this status has been lost after Beijing informally banned the import of Australian coal.
Indonesia is China's second-largest source of supply. While imports from Australia are almost extinct, Indonesia is also seeing a surge in demand.
In contrast, India’s export situation has been reversed. Indonesia’s status as India’s largest coal supplier may have to be snatched from Australia, which previously only exported relatively small amounts of coking coal to India.
The December data compiled by Refinitiv clearly reflects changes in coal trade flows.
China's coal imports from Australia in December were only 447,523 million tons, the lowest level since Refinitiv began compiling ship tracking and port data in January 2015. This is a significant drop from the high of 9.64 million tons set in June 2020.
Even these small imports from Australia may not reach the end-users, because Refinitiv’s data only reflects the unloaded cargo, which means that these cargoes may not have gone through customs clearance procedures.
However, China's coal imports from Indonesia soared to 12.19 million tons in December, easily surpassing the record high of 10.47 million tons set in April 2019 and nearly three times the 4.3 million tons imported in November.
India imported 6.24 million tons from Australia in December, up from 5.06 million tons in November and 5.48 million tons in October. The imports in the past three months have exceeded the record high of 4.81 million tons set in December 2019. .
India imported 5.65 million tons from Indonesia in December, which is lower than the amount imported from Australia, and also lower than 5.82 million tons in November and 6.75 million tons in October.
The December data is also well below India's highest record of 10.58 million tons imported from Indonesia in April 2019.
