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.
There has been a recent flurry of steel producer acquisitions of scrap processors (SDI-Omnisource, Nucor- DJ Joseph, DJ Joseph-MRS, Galamba) and persistent rumors that others are circling targets. By my calculations steel producers now control about 40% of the US ferrous scrap industry. They controlled less than half that only a few years ago. If the experience of US integrated producers and the iron ore industry at the turn of the last century is anything to go by, there’s more to come.
This paper describes the process of vertical integration into iron ore production pursued by steel producers in the 1890’s. In 1896 65% of the total iron ore consumed in the US came from mines located in the Lake Superior region. There were more than 100 companies located in the region and they produced about 10MT tons of ore between them. But only one company, the Oliver Mining Company, was owned by a steel producer (Carnegie Steel).
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US imports actuals for January were 86% higher than December imports reaching 385,000 short tons, confirming the high level of January imports predicted by license applications. February licenses which are usually updated each Tuesday have not yet been reported. The spreadsheet below will be updated as soon as the new figures arrive.
EditGrid Spreadsheet by user/nerdsofsteel.
Below is a presentation I made at Steel Business Briefing’s North American steel conference held in Chicago March 2008. The topic of my panel was “American Steel: Land of Opportunity”. My presentation deals with the recent acquisition of steel assets in North America by companies headquartered outside the region and argues that the North American steel industry is stronger because of the involvement of global consolidators. The presentation also argues that the restructured North American steel industry is a model for other regions, all of which are or will eventually experience a similar restructuring of ownership and thereby bring about a more sustainable global industry structure.
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”.
