News · Data · Port of Newcastle
The port’s diversified trade grew 31 per cent. Nine tenths of the growth was wheat
Port of Newcastle publishes an annual trade report, and the 2025 edition is a nine-page document that repays reading line by line. The headline is genuinely good news for a region trying to move past coal: diversified trade up 30.8 per cent to 11.1 million tonnes, and coal’s share of everything down to 93.06 per cent. Then you find the commodity table. Wheat exports went from 594,220 tonnes to 2,948,130, and that single line is 89.8 per cent of the entire diversification increase. A harvest is not a transition. Underneath it, coal barely moved, and where it went changed.
The three numbers on the first page
The report opens with a trade overview that gives the whole year in three comparisons. Coal revenue tonnes: 149,028,111 in 2025 against 149,950,823 in 2024, a fall of 922,712 tonnes or 0.62 per cent. Diversified trade: 11,116,330 against 8,495,735, a rise of 2,620,595 tonnes or 30.8 per cent. Coal as a proportion of total trade: 93.06 per cent, down from 94.64.
Read alone, that is a port diversifying. A third more non-coal trade in a single year is not nothing, and the share shift is real. It is also, at 1.58 percentage points, the kind of movement that needs about sixty more years at the same pace before coal stops being the port.
Where the diversification actually came from
The commodity tables are where the year gets interesting. Diversified trade is not a separate business: it is everything that is not coal exports, which is to say non-coal exports plus all imports. Non-coal exports were 4,822,023 tonnes and total imports 6,294,307, which sum to exactly the 11,116,330 on the front page.
Within that, one line moved:
| Commodity | 2025 | 2024 (restated) | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wheat | 2,948,130 | 594,220 | +2,353,910 |
| Meals and grains | 1,016,917 | 851,469 | +165,448 |
| Mineral concentrates | 530,684 | 491,758 | +38,926 |
| Aluminium | 59,695 | 76,003 | -16,308 |
| Other cargo | 14,733 | 30,295 | -15,562 |
| Coal | 149,028,111 | 149,950,823 | -922,712 |
Wheat alone accounts for 89.8 per cent of the 2,620,595 tonne increase in diversified trade. Grain volumes through an Australian port track the season, not the strategy. A five-fold jump in wheat exports in one year is a statement about rainfall and harvest, and it will reverse in a dry year without anybody at the port doing anything differently.
That is not an argument that the port is standing still. It is an argument that this particular number should not be read as evidence that it is moving. The things that would be evidence, a container terminal, the clean energy precinct, sustained growth in project cargo, are not what drove this figure. Machinery and project cargo exports did rise, from 13,847 tonnes to 19,383, and imports of the same category rose from 164,126 to 412,007, which is a real increase and about a tenth the size of the wheat swing.
Coal held its total and changed its destination
The coal number barely moved, which on its own reads as a flat year. The destination table says something else happened inside it.
| Destination | 2025 | 2024 (restated) | Share 2025 | Share 2024 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Japan | 66,338,023 | 66,466,704 | 44.5% | 44.3% |
| Mainland China | 40,605,696 | 44,291,859 | 27.2% | 29.5% |
| Taiwan | 17,202,234 | 17,088,746 | 11.5% | 11.4% |
| Malaysia | 6,614,412 | 6,195,970 | 4.4% | 4.1% |
| South Korea | 5,602,312 | 5,736,445 | 3.8% | 3.8% |
| Thailand | 3,742,769 | 3,881,571 | 2.5% | 2.6% |
| Vietnam | 3,099,581 | 1,961,625 | 2.1% | 1.3% |
| Other | 5,823,084 | 4,327,903 | 3.9% | 2.9% |
Mainland China took 3,686,163 fewer tonnes, a fall of 8.3 per cent and a 2.3
point drop in its share. Japan, the largest customer, was flat to within 0.2 per cent. The tonnes
China did not take turn up in the smaller columns: Vietnam up 58 per cent and the
unnamed Other
category up 34.5 per cent, together adding 2.6 million tonnes.
Our view, labelled as such: a flat headline hiding a 3.7 million tonne shift in the largest growth market is the more consequential fact in this report, and it is the one the overview page cannot show you. Whether it is a one-year commercial fluctuation or the start of something is not answerable from a single edition, which is precisely why the 2026 report is worth reading the day it appears.
Two smaller things worth noticing
Coal vessel visits rose while coal tonnage fell: 1,757 against 1,724, up 1.9 per cent, moving 0.62 per cent less coal. Non-coal vessels were flat at 574 against 573. And cruise ship visits nearly halved, from 17 to 9.
Several export lines went to zero: fertiliser from 5,268 tonnes, cement and dry bulk from 10,715, steel from 3,849. Each is small, and a line falling to nil in a single year usually means a customer or a contract rather than a trend, so we are noting them rather than building on them.
The caveat the report puts on itself
Every 2024 figure above is a restated one, and that is the report’s own doing. It records
that during 2025 the port
implemented enhancements to reporting processes to ensure trade volumes align with operational and financial records
,
and that to keep one methodology across the report
2024 trade and operational data have been restated
,
with the result that
some commodity categories differ from those previously reported for 2024
.
That matters for anyone checking this against last year’s coverage. The comparisons here are 2025 against the restated 2024, which is the like-for-like the report intends. Comparing any of these to a figure published in the 2024 edition would not be like-for-like, and we have not done it.
How we read this
Every figure comes from Port of Newcastle’s 2025 Annual Trade Report, downloaded and read in full on 26 August 2026. Percentages and tonne differences are ours, calculated from the report’s own figures; the report states the two share figures, 93.06 and 94.64 per cent, and the destination shares. Revenue tonnes are the report’s unit throughout.
We checked our reading of what diversified trade means rather than assuming it. Non-coal exports of 4,822,023 tonnes plus total imports of 6,294,307 equal 11,116,330, which is the diversified figure on the overview page exactly. That confirms the category includes imports, so coal and diversified trade cannot be added to reach total exports, and we have not done so.
We have not put questions to the port. This is a reading of a document the port published, not an account of its strategy, and where the report offers a reason for a movement we have not invented one. The wheat interpretation is ours and is labelled as such.
One access note. The port’s publications now sit on pon.com.au;
portofnewcastle.com.au redirects. The publications index is at
pon.com.au/the-port/publications/ and serves PDFs to a plain fetch,
though a scripted request to the old host can fail on TLS rather than return an error page.
Sources
- Port of Newcastle, 2025 Annual Trade Report (PDF, 9 pages, downloaded and read in full 26 August 2026): the trade overview, the commodity export and import tables, the coal export destination table, the vessel movement figures and the restatement note quoted above.
- Port of Newcastle, Publications: the index the report was taken from, read 26 August 2026.
Spotted an error? Request a correction and we will check it against the report and log the outcome here.