Drybulk freight rates information sources; the cost of shipping iron ore and coal around the world

by Jessica Wagner on April 14, 2008

in Books & Resources,Data,Raw Materials

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.