Slowdown signs - Coal ships queue at DBCT reducesMonday, 09 Feb 2009
The Australian reported that months ago, more than 70 giant coal ships lay anchored the queue stretching to the horizon and almost 100 kilometers south but now there were only 17.
In mid 2007, as Australia rode China's insatiable demand for our commodities, ships and their bored crews would wait almost a month at anchor for their chance to enter the port. Yesterday, the wait was down to eight days.
Newcastle Port partly attributes the shortened queue to infrastructure spending and efforts to remove bottlenecks that have plagued the facility and others like it. But there is no doubt that falling Asian demand for thermal coal for power generation and coking coal and iron ore for steel making, means fewer ships making the trip north.
Mr Greg Smith GM Dalrymple Bay of port operations said recently that a drop in the number of ships became obvious in the middle of November. He said that "We started to see the impact of the global financial crisis in the middle of November and the slowdown in the number of ships is definitely due to a slowing down in demand and some games going on with price negotiations."
Mr Smith said that with steel mills globally cutting production by 15% to 30%, there was less demand for coking coal.
Mr James Rickards spokesman of Xstrata Coal Rickards said that enormous efforts had gone into improving port structures in the past couple of years, but the global economic downturn was having a significant impact on consumer demand.