China’s coal imports from Australia surged in September to their highest level since April 2020, before Beijing’s unofficial ban on Australian coal disrupted trade, customs data reported on Tuesday showed. The headline recovery sits inside a weaker total: China’s overall coal imports fell 5.73 percent year on year to 43.37 million tonnes in September, though they rose 3.03 percent from August, and January to September imports were 353.54 million tonnes, up 2.2 percent year on year.
The Australian gain is concentrated in coking coal. Australian exports to China more than doubled in September to 3.34 million tonnes, as Chinese buyers turned to imports while domestic supply stayed tight. A Mysteel survey on September 16 found 75 coking coal mines still shut in Shanxi after the May accident that triggered safety suspensions across the province, and Australian government analysis expects the import support to continue while inspections and production quotas bind.
Prices reflect the tightness. Seaborne coking coal stood at about 265.50 dollars a tonne on September 24, and Dalian coking coal futures hit a two year high of 1,729 yuan a tonne on August 31 before falling 12 percent. The demand side is not helping: China’s crude steel output fell 2.9 percent in the first nine months and only about 7 percent of Chinese mills were profitable in September, according to Wood Mackenzie analysis cited in the same reporting.
For Australian producers, led by the BHP Mitsubishi Alliance in Queensland, the trade is welcome and temporary in structure. It depends on Shanxi’s restart pace, which Bloomberg Intelligence expects to recover steadily in the fourth quarter with full normalisation possibly slipping into the first half of 2027, rather than on any structural change in Chinese import policy.