When Tom Albanese of Rio Tinto, unveiling a disappointing set of Q3s on Wednesday, warned of “infrastructure challenges” at congested ports in Australia, some might have suspected this was the global mining equivalent of blaming bad trading on too much weather.
But here is some graphical support for the man - courtesy of Sempra Metals.
The chart shows the forecast freight queues outside Australia’s Newcastle coal loading terminal based on projected ship arrivals.
Two projections are shown, the first done on Sep 17 and the second done on Oct 15. The forecast queue has lengthened considerably in the space of a month.
In mid-September, the queue was forecast to shorten to just 29 vessels by the end of Nov. But this week’s forecast suggests the queue will still be stuck at 45 vessels at the end of November, taking an additional sixteen vessels out of the market.
It also helps to explain why the Baltic Dry Freight index, which gauges the strength of seaborne trade for commodities such as coal and iron ore, has surged from 5600 to above 9900 since July.
