Glencore positive on coal turnaround – by Martin Creamer (Mining Weekly – March 1, 2016)

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JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Diversified mining and marketing company Glencore, which plays a leading role in the global seaborne steam coal market, including being the major exporter of the mineral out of South Africa’s Richards Bay Coal Terminal (RBCT), spoke positively on Tuesday on the outlook for a coal turnaround.

“Coal is looking interesting. Supply has been cut. There’s a tightness in Richards Bay at the moment and I see even in February there were certain vessels waiting to load coal. “A lot of changes. A lot of dynamics. A lot happening in the coal market,” Glencore CEO Ivan Glasenberg said in response to Creamer Media’s Mining Weekly Online during a media conference call.

Earlier, the head of the London-, Hong Kong- and Johannesburg-listed company had also made it clear in response to analysts that his company was giving consideration to acquiring the coal stake that Anglo American is selling in Cerrejon in Colombia, where Glencore is already a third shareholder.

“In my 32 years in the business, I’ve never seen a situation of no new coal mines being built anywhere in the world to supply seaborne coal,” Glasenberg commented, adding that the company believed that the supply of seaborne coal would decrease to around 870-million tonnes this year, down from the 900-million-tonnes level.

Coal exports from Indonesia were set to fall to 337-million tonnes this year, which would remove nearly 100-million tonnes out of the seaborne market. Even though coal offtake by China would drop to around 100-million tonnes this year from about 140-million tonnes last year, imports into India had increased considerably.

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