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DP World has struck a partial peace deal with the maritime union to suspend industrial action at its terminals, but is still facing crippling 24-hour strikes at Port Botany. The Maritime Union of Australia significantly escalated industrial action at the struggling stevedore on Friday afternoon in protest over the company’s wage offer and its bid to scrap the union’s income protection scheme, Protect. However, following urgent talks over the weekend and into Monday, the union agreed to a three-month suspension of overtime bans and stoppages for all terminals except Port ...

MMC Corp Bhd’s Tanjung Pelepas Port (PTP) has an advantage over Ports of Singapore, in terms of land availability, enabling a wider free zone to be setup. MIDF Research said the development of the free zones could attract more multinational companies to shift their warehouse operations to PTP and eventually this will also include container volume. It said out of the 3,500 acres of land covering PTP, around 1,000 acres had been allocated for the PTP Free Zone. “The tenure of the lease agreement with companies setting up warehouses usually ...

Cyclone-hit Rio Tinto has added to upward pressure on iron ore prices that are now expected to stay high for a long time and deliver an even bigger budget windfall for federal treasurer Josh Frydenberg. Rio said on Monday that a combination of damage and disruption caused by Cyclone Veronica last month and a fire in January would cut iron ore production by 14 million tonnes this year. The double whammy means Rio’s iron ore shipments from Western Australia’s Pilbara region are expected to be at the lower end of ...

Iraq’s oil exports fell month-on-month to an average of 3.377 million barrels per day (bpd) in March, the Oil Ministry said on Monday, as poor weather interrupted loadings and producer group OPEC continued to cut supplies. Iraq, the second-largest producer in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, exported 3.62 million bpd of crude oil in February. Exports from Iraq’s southern Basra ports stood at 3.254 million bpd, the ministry said, down from 3.54 million bpd in February. Bad weather in the Gulf halted the loading of crude on some ...

Oil hit a 2019 high above $69 a barrel on Tuesday on the prospect that more sanctions against Iran and further Venezuelan disruptions could deepen an OPEC-led supply cut, and as the market became less worried that demand may slow. The United States is considering more sanctions against Iran, whose oil exports have been halved by existing measures, an official said. A key crude terminal in Venezuela, also under U.S. sanctions, has halted operations again. Brent crude rose 10 cents to $69.11 a barrel by 0826 GMT, having touched $69.50, ...

The rollout of the International Marine Organization’s switch towards lower sulfur marine fuels in 2020 has dominated the conversation in both the crude and refined product markets throughout the first quarter of the year and will continue to do so moving forward. Early 2019 was defined by a sharp narrowing of the spreads between lighter, sweet crudes and heavier, more sour ones. This was evident in the Brent-Dubai Exchange Futures for Swaps market, which dropped to multi-year lows in late-February. This was felt most sharply in Europe through the Urals ...

Hedge funds are becoming increasingly bullish on oil prices amid signs of slowing production growth as a result of output cuts by Saudi Arabia and a reduction in U.S. shale drilling. Hedge funds and other money managers bought 37 million barrels of futures and options in the six most important contracts linked to petroleum prices in the week to March 26. Funds have boosted their bullish position in the six major contracts by a total of 421 million barrels over the last 11 weeks, according to position reports published by ...

Vitol Group’s head of liquefied natural gas trading said that the outlook was bleak for LNG in the short term due to an “incredibly” oversupplied market, which would lead to some output shutdowns. “We had record imports of LNG into Europe. Three years ago we saw 63 cargoes in one month, in March we see 125 cargoes, April and May we expect 150 and 170 cargoes… This is really unprecedented,” Pablo Galante Escobar, Vitol’s head of LNG, told the FT Commodities Global Summit in Switzerland. “We said before that we ...

Global stocks mostly paused on Tuesday as investors took a breath after sharp gains on the first day of 2019’s second quarter. Indexes around the world jumped Monday after gauges of manufacturing activity in both the U.S. and China stabilized from earlier slowdowns. But the flurry of early-week buying slowed to a crawl on Tuesday, with Asian indexes ticking gently higher. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was flat, while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index rose 0.1%. South Korea’s Kospi benchmark rose 0.4%, shrugging off weaker-than-expected inflation data released Tuesday. In Europe, the ...

The pound headed south on Tuesday following lawmakers’ failure to agree on an alternative plan to Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit deal and as the European Union’s chief negotiator warned it would not re-negotiate the agreement. At the start of London trading session, sterling extended losses to touch $1.3025, down 0.6 percent on the day. Against the euro, it dropped half a percent to 85.92 pence. May will chair a five-hour cabinet meeting on Tuesday in an attempt to plot a course out of the Brexit deadlock. Source: Reuters (Reporting ...

China’s first official economic gauge for March signaled a stabilisation in the world’s second-largest economy, easing one of the biggest worries for the global outlook. The manufacturing purchasing managers index rose to 50.5 from 49.2 last month, the biggest increase since 2012 and exceeding all estimates by economists. Both new orders and new export orders – leading sub-gauges that signal future activities – rose to the highest levels in six months. That’s good news for global investors, as China’s weakening demand had weighed on sectors such as car producers and ...

Euro zone inflation unexpectedly slowed in March, adding to the pressure on the European Central Bank (ECB) as it battles an economic slowdown which threatens to undo years of stimulus. Headline inflation in the 19 countries sharing the euro slowed to 1.4 percent in March from 1.5 percent a month earlier, short of market expectations for a steady rate and also well below the ECB’s target of almost 2 percent. In a more worrying sign, a closely watched underlying inflation figure that excludes volatile food and energy prices, slowed to ...

Global growth fears may soon loosen their hold on the U.S. stock market, says PNC’s Jeff Mills. “I think, as we move into the second half of the year, this narrative of global growth potentially causing problems here in the U.S. is going to shift to a stabilization of global growth and then more of a focus on things like earnings,” Mills told CNBC’s “Futures Now” on Thursday. Mills, who is co-chief investment strategist at PNC Financial Services Group, wasn’t as fazed by last week’s yield curve inversion as most ...

Daily rates on main tanker routes as compiled by shipbroker Charles R. Weber.

Sixty-six vessels carrying 9.98 million mt of iron ore were expected to arrive at