SINGAPORE - Asian coal prices have risen 3 percent since the start of August as Indonesian production cuts provide a floor for a market that has lost two-thirds of its value in the past four years, but analysts say a big price rebound is unlikely due to oversupply. Benchmark prices for Australian coal cargoes from its Newcastle port have dropped 68 percent since peaking in 2011, with most analysts citing oversupply as miners ramped up output just as demand in China slowed for the first time in decades. In response to the price slump, Indonesia, the world’s top coal exporter, produced 166 million tonnes of thermal coal from January to May this year, down 19.4 percent from the same period last year. But Fabio Gabrieli, director of dry bulk analysis at Mercuria Energy Trading, said there was more at play than China’s slowing demand, and that August’s 3 percent price increase despite the Chinese weakness was a “virtual floor” for seaborne hard coal prices. “Market consensus is for Indonesian coal exports to fall this year just as a consequence of the Chinese import slump. The market is always right, as they say, but there is something more behind it,” he said. “Despite a big drop in Chinese imports, one has to look at coal prices by paying attention to quality differentials, not only volumes.” Gabrieli said China’s likely 60-million-tonne drop in thermal coal imports in 2015 largely affected mid-to-low-calorific-value (cv) coal, limiting its impact on international coal prices such as Australia’s Newcastle benchmark, which is a price for high cv thermal coal cargoes. With China’s waning commodity hunger, prices have slumped, but Gabrieli said the recent support was a result of cuts in Indonesian high calorific value coal. “At current prices, half of the forecasted 45 million tonnes drop in Indonesian exports this year is either of high- or mid-cv qualities,” he said. Higher-cv coal such as hard coal is traded in a seaborne market between big exporters such as Indonesia, Australia, South Africa and Colombia and buyers in Asia and Europe. “In Asia, demand growth for mid- and high-cv coal is now very close to the growth of exports for the same qualities. That gives Asian prices some support,” Gabrieli said. Despite these cuts, there seems little momentum for bigger price rises as the market remains oversupplied and demand is slowing not only in China, but also in India. “Coal-fired power generation growth (in India) ... has slowed to less than 4 percent this year. Absent any infrastructure constraints, this should structurally reduce India’s import reliance and ... Indian thermal coal imports will be under pressure during the rest of 2015,” Macquarie Bank said.