China's commodity import levels down in Jan

Liu Dongna, a coal analyst with Sublime China, said the decline in coal imports was mainly caused by the government's policy of encouraging domestic coal use and the stricter management of imported coal.

Domestic coal demand is weakening because the economic slowdown has resulted in weaker power consumption as domestic coal prices continued to fall, Liu said.

Affected by the shrinking domestic manufacturing industry and the economic slowdown, China's crude imports also edged lower year-on-year by 0.6 percent last month to 27.98 million tons, said Gao Jian, a crude analyst with Sublime China.

"The main reason for the decline in crude imports, however, might be that China is close to the end of the second phase of expanding its strategic crude storage facilities," he said.

China has been rapidly increasing its crude imports since the global crude price first started to plunge in June last year. In December, crude imports hit a record high of 30.37 million tons.

January crude imports were 2.39 million tons less compared with December, or a 7.87 percent fall month-on-month. Lin Jiaxin, an analyst with ICIS C1 Energy, a Shanghai-based energy information consultancy, said although crude imports fell last month, they were still at a high level.

"China's daily crude refining output was around 1.36 million tons, 0.5 percent down compared with the figure for December, which also contributed to the fall in crude imports," she said.