Are Indian Ports in West Coast more impacted by Lockdown due to COVID-19?

With the Indian government announcing nation-wide 21 days lockdown starting from 24 March 2020 and ports declaring Force Majeure two days later amid growing concerns of COVID-19, the entire steel and related raw material supply chain have been disrupted with coal being no exception to it.

Under CoalMint research, we have carried out the analysis of stocks at 20 key ports that handle the imported coal in India in order to understand the impact of COVID-19 outbreak in India that started in the first week of March 2020.

From the above table it can be seen that, if we compare coal stock at ports in east coast of India (ECI) against ports in west coast of India (WCI), the coal inventory at WCI has registered a surge of 13% w-o-w basis from 5.17 MnT in Week-1 (1-5 Mar) to 5.82 MnT in Week - 4 (22 -26 Mar) whereas in ECI the same has plunged down marginally by 0.4% from 11 MnT in Week-1 (1-5 Mar) to 11 MnT in Week 4 (22-26 Mar).

According to the market sources, the key port in WCI for coal imports is Kandla and the coal movement at the port had started to suffer since mid of March amid the rising COVID-19 cases in the state, even before the official country lockdown happened on 24 Mar'2020. The coal stock at Kandla port in Week-1 stood at 1.61 MnT which increased to 2.29 MnT in Week-4, a surge of 42%. The coal stock at another port in WCI, Navlakhi also surged from 0.8 MnT in W1 to 0.9 MnT in W2, an increase of 14%.

The coal stock position at three ports in ECI, Gangavaram, Paradip and Vizag increased by 5%, 2%, and 8% respectively in W4 against W1. On the other hand, Haldia, Tuticorin and Krishnapatnam ports were less impacted due to lockdown, as the stocks in all the three ports fell by 7%, 26%, and 21% respectively. The key reason being these ports were fully operational before lockdown was announced with road, rail movements uninterrupted.

India's coal stock at port snapshot (Quantity in MnT)