Thermal coal is Glencore biggest business in Australia and – despite its current challenges – the company is optimistic about the long-term future, he said.

“This is a good time in the cycle for this,” he said.

“But we will only do it at the right price.

“While weaker demand in China is an important factor in the current low coal price, Glencore’s long-term supply and demand outlook has never relied on ongoing Chinese import growth.

“We remain bullish about thermal coal in the longer-term, particularly based on our detailed understanding of thermal power station build – and demand – in Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, India and Japan.”

Glencore’s Australian Coal business employs more than 8000 people in 20 mines across 13 mining complexes in NSW and Queensland. Last year it managed the production of 98 million tonnes of coal.

Freyberg said the decision not to proceed with the $7 billion Wandoan thermal coal mine in Queensland’s Surat Basin was not taken lightly.

“Placing Wandoan on hold was the right thing to do by our shareholders and the rest of the Australian thermal export market,” he said.

“More recently, we announced that we would reduce our 2015 coal exports by 15 million tonnes.

“Our business plan saw us increasing exports.

“Our installed capacity – after our Clermont acquisition last year – was programmed to run close to 110 million tonnes. But the market doesn’t need all this coal. So we’ve cut.”

Glencore has decided not to produce anywhere near that volume this year. “We think an appropriate level of exports this year is closer to 90 million tonnes than to 100 million tonnes,” Freyberg said.

“Simply put, our decision to remove volume is the responsible thing to do.

“We will not push incremental tonnes into markets that don’t want them or need them.

“Doing so would force prices down further.

“Right now we aren’t looking at incremental build.”

Freyberg said Glencore wanted to keep its overheads low and management structure simple.

“We keep things simple,” he said. “We are accountable but we’re lean and keep bureaucracy to a minimum.

“For example, we run our global coal assets from Sydney with a team of dozen people.

“That’s 12 people covering three continents and 180 million tonnes of coal.” Almost all the leadership working across Glencore global coal business was with the company prior to the spin-off of Xstrata 13 years ago.

“We don’t move people from one commodity to another,” he said.

“We believe in developing commodity expertise rather than developing process expertise.”