The Chinese order to secure supplies at all costs has highly positive implications for the dry bulk market as well.

With power outages no longer being tolerated, Chinese coal imports are set to increase going forward (at least highly likely).

According to IEA, China’s total thermal coal demand is ~3.1bn tons (~2.3bn for electricity and heat and ~0.7bn for non-power), however, with only ~240m tons of imports, imports are only serving ~8% of total thermal coal demand. As such, if demand increases by 1%, imports should increase by as much as ~13%, assuming that all incremental demand is served by imports. Similarly, a 2% increase in demand, would imply ~26% increase in imports. To put that further into perspective, total seaborne coal trade is about 1.3bn tons. As such, a 1% and 2% increase in Chinese demand (once again assuming that incremental demand is served by imports), would imply a ~2-5% increase in seaborne trade (all else equal).