China’s small coal miners are still losing money and struggling to pay off debt after being ordered to shut inefficient, outdated operations and forced to miss out on a historic price rally, a senior industry official said. Jiang Zhimin, vice chairman of China’s Coal Industry Association, flagged the widening gap between big state-owned coal producers and the smaller private ones in the world’s top consumer of the fuel in the wake of a crackdown by Beijing on illegal mines and curbs on coal transport by trucks. “Many producers, who were ordered to cut capacity, did not deal with their debt properly. The debt ratio for these producers rose significantly,” Jiang said in a speech published in state-run China Coal News. In the […]