Rio Tinto Group (RIO-US), the world's No. 2 miner, has recently withdrawn from coal miners' investments and moved to other assets, and is also looking for buyers for its remaining coal assets in Australia.
Rio Tinto's move to a "coal-free" future is clearly in the opposite direction of most other competitors, as global commodity giant Glencore Plc agreed this year to pay $ 1.1 billion to bid for Rio Tinto's Australian assets for sale, supporting around 40% % Of electricity and fossil fuel, is still one of BHP Billiton's main business strategies.
Although most miners are still optimistic about coal, the market is also noticing the increase in demand for reducing the risk of ore fuels by industry. For example, a Norwegian sovereign wealth fund stated that it would not invest 30% of its coal-based sales and that the Church of England property fund set this limit at 10%.
Although Rio Tinto's decision, it is more difficult to compete with other assets in the coal mining business rather than from climate change or divestment pressure. Jean-Sebastien Jacques, Rio Tinto's chief executive, said that even if the company is well-funded, it must focus more on more productive assets, sell coal mines at a fair price and at the same time increase more cash back to its shareholders.
Even so, experts believe that miners are also gradually thinking about the global push to curb the future of greenhouse gases or how they will affect commodities. Helen Wildsmith, head of CCLA Investment Management, said, "Large multivendors are trying to find out which commodities have the weakest future and the low-carbon trend is one of the biggest uncertainties they face with other companies."
Since the spin-off of the energy sector in 2015, Rio Tinto has been phasing out Australian coal assets. The company earlier this year agreed to sell its Coal & Allied Industries Ltd. to China's Yanzhou Coal, while selling assets in Australia, Mozambique and other regions.
Recently, the China Coal Industry Association released data show that from October 28 to November 3, "CCTD Qinhuangdao thermal coal prices," all kinds of spot thermal coal prices in the Bohai Sea region dropped overall, but the decline is generally small. Among them, CCTD5500 to close at 615 yuan / ton, lower than the October 30 release price of 1 yuan / ton; CCTD5000 to close at 596 yuan / ton, lower than the October 30 release price of 2 yuan / ton.
What deserves our attention is that the daily electricity consumption level of the six major power generation enterprises in the coastal areas continued to decline not only below the level of the same period of last year but also dropped to the lowest level since the Spring Festival this year. In the meantime, the coal inventories of these power generation companies continued to rise during the reporting period, reaching 12.25 million tons on November 3 and an increase of 1.095 million tons from October 27, lower than the recent low on October 16 Point increase of 2.842 million tons; November 3 coal available inventory days also increased to a reasonable high level of 23.8 days, an increase of 5.6 days from October 27, compared with the recent October 14 low of 9.8 increased 9.8 day.
After the price of spot thermal coal in the Bohai Rim went into a downward trend, the enthusiasm among coal production and sales enterprises for "hoarding coal" declined. Consumption enterprises' mentality of "buying and noting for buying off" has been somewhat enhanced. The price trend of short-term spot thermal coal is generally pessimistic, It is also one of the reasons why the spot coal price in the Bohai Rim has kept going down.
