The most recently released data as of June 12th shows the daily coal burn rate at China’s six major coastal power plants has come in at 759,000 tons.  This is 2% stronger than was seen in early June, marks the highest daily burn seen since February, and is up year-on-year by 2%. 

As we have been highlighting in our research, China’s ongoing strengthening in coal burn remains very much in line with various coronavirus restrictions recently being eased across the country.  The burn rate is most important to us for further gauging China’s current industrial production and its near-term industrial production prospects (rather than simply gauging what to expect for coal imports).  Overall, it remains encouraging that coal burn in China has recently returned to experiencing year-on-year growth.  As we also discussed, steel output has recently started to experience year-on-year growth as well.