Market and product

Although the government has tightened regulations on coal exports, and Vietnam itself has to import the mineral, the Vietnam National Coal and Mineral Industries Group (Vinacomin) has consistently shipped huge amounts of coal overseas.

Vinacomin has exported a total of 12.5 tonnes of coal in the year to September, and the full-year figure is expected to reach 16.5 million tonnes, enabling Vietnam to remain one of the world’s five largest coal exporters.

At Vinacomin’s coal mines in the northern province of Quang Ninh, workers have been busily extracting the resource to achieve the group’s target of 47.06 million tonnes of crude coal.

The Ministry of Industry and Trade said the coal extraction of Vinacomin has steadily risen during the last five years, and so have the company’s profits and export values.

In 2006 Vinacomin enjoyed profits of 15.3 trillion dong from coal mining, and just four years later that figure had more than doubled, to VND36.5 trillion, the ministry said.

Last year the company pocketed an impressive profit of $1.4 billion from the export of 18.7 million tonnes of coal.

An official from the Ministry of Finance said that since the country’s coal exports have developed at an extremely rapid pace in spite of the government’s policy of restricting mineral exports, his ministry has hiked coal export tariffs from 5 percent to 20 percent, as of last September.

Nguyen Thanh Son, head of the management board of coal projects in the Red River Delta, said that around 10 million tonnes of the exported coal are actually needed for domestic use, and that the country will need to import coal in the near future.

Geologist Le Quang Canh said China is currently Vinacomin’s largest partner, adding the country has to buy coal from Vietnam since Chinese coal extraction costs have recently soared.

For his part, Vinacomin chair Tran Xuan Hoa confirmed with Tuoi Tre that Vietnam is among the world’s largest coal exporters, while it will have to import around 5 million tonnes of coal by 2015.

Hoa said that since Vietnamese coal is highly valuable, it would be wasteful to use it for domestic power production, adding the country can afford the import price of $300 a tonne for such purpose. “It is simply normal to import coal,” he said.

“China produces 3.5 billion tonnes of coal annually but it still has to import hundreds of millions of tonnes of the mineral every year.”

Source Tuoi Tre