Nerds of Steel

If you want to understand freight rates, you might first want to go to an industry overview provided by Genco Shipping and Trading Limited It includes a very good description of how different drybulk materials are shipped and what the rates you will find actually mean.

You can find current iron ore and coal freight rates on a webpage provided by metaljunction. By clicking on the world map freight route, and by “viewing the details”, you can in many cases get information on shipper, vessel name, tonnage, loading port, unloading port, etc.

Another site by the shipbroking group Simpson Spence and Young provides graphs of iron ore and coal freight rates for major world routes from January to December 2007

If you are trying to understand the historic freight differential between iron ore shipments from Brazil to China and Australia to China, see a BHP presentation from 2005, slide 15, which shows the differential from August 2001 to February 2005. Slide 16 then shows delivered costs of iron ore into China from February 2002 to December 2004.

Finally, as you probably know, there are two well-know indices of drybulk freight rates, one is from the Baltic Exchange, and the other is from JE Hyde. The Baltic indices are only available to Baltic Exchange subscribers, but you can get both the Baltic indices and the JE Hyde indices if you have a subscription to Metal Bulletin and click on the category “Maritime News”. If you don’t have Metal Bulletin access, you can read the JE Hyde indices levels in the banner on the JE Hyde home page.

A good source of iron ore statistics are reports published by the UNCTAD secretariat (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) in cooperation with the Raw Materials Group, based in Sweden. You can view all the available publications on the Raw Materials Group website, but you can read the full World Investment Report 2007 by downloading different chapters on the UNCTAD website. This report doesn’t provide all the iron ore statistics you may be looking for , but it does examine trends in commodity pricing and the future of the current “commodity price boom”.

Below are the IISI iron & steel production statistics found on the Japan Iron and Steel Federation website converted from pdf format to Excel. The spreadsheet also includes iron production. Clicking on ‘Editgrid Spreadsheet’ will show a full size version available for copying or saving.

EditGrid Spreadsheet by user/nerdsofsteel.

You may be interested to know that you can find preliminary IISI iron and crude steel production statistics for 2007 by country on the Japan Iron and Steel Federation Website. These statistics aren’t available on the IISI website and aren’t usually published in the IISI Steel Statistical Yearbook until July.