China's spot seaborne iron ore trade is continuing to shift to floating deals as uncertainty about price direction discourages fixed-price transactions.
Last year, 60.6pc of the 33.62mn t transactions done on China's leading online trading platform Corex were index-linked, while the remainder were fixed-price deals. This was mostly stable from 2016, but continues the major change from 2015 and earlier. Fixed-price deals made up over 70pc of total transactions on Corex in 2015.