‘Much stronger market for the remainder of the year’

Global – Ferrous scrap prices may not have exhibited the same upward mobility as coking coal but they have still made sizeable gains over the last few weeks. Latest cfr price indications for shipments from Europe to Turkey are US$ 235-240 per tonne for standard quality HMS I/II 80/20 scrap and US$ 240-245 for shredded.

Tom Bird of UK-based Liberty Steel told the BIR ferrous division meeting in Amsterdam last week that there was ‘no reason to see anything other than a much stronger market for the remainder of the year’, with November likely to bring ‘a significant increase’ in scrap prices. And George Adams of SA Recycling in the USA concluded that scrap prices were unlikely to fall in November given that US yards were not witnessing good inflows.

But caution was still advised in Amsterdam, with Bird telling delegates: ‘We do need steel prices to improve.’

Year-to-date crude steel production in China moved ahead of 2015 levels following a significant increase in September. The country’s output was 3.9% higher than in the same month last year at 68.17 million tonnes to give a running total of 603.78 million tonnes for the first three quarters of 2016, which equates to an increase of 0.4% over the same period in 2015.

Combined, the 66 countries reporting to the World Steel Association produced 132.909 million tonnes of crude steel in September for a year-on-year upturn of 2% whereas the 1.197 billion tonnes generated by them across the first nine months of the year represented a decline of 0.5% over 2015. Crude steel capacity utilisation in September this year was 70% as compared to 68.5% in the preceding month and 69.5% in September 2015.

*The full version of Recycling International’s latest ferrous market report will appear in its November issue.