Germany tops Finland’s stainless scrap suppliers in 2024

Stainless steel production powerhouse Finland imported more than 745,000 metric tons of waterborne stainless steel scrap last year, with more than 75 percent of that total shipped from ports in Germany and the Netherlands.

Those figures have been calculated by Navigate Commodities, a global Singapore-based dry bulk commodity supply chain intelligence firm that focuses on the upstream and downstream iron, steel, stainless and nickel industries.

The company’s Managing Director Atilla Widnell posted a graphic early this month to LinkedIn that portrays Finland’s 2024 waterborne shipments.  

According to Widnell, Navigate uses satellite-based technologies to track river barges, ocean-going vessels, inventory stockpile levels and, ultimately, melt shop activity around the world in the steel and stainless steel sectors.

Last month, Widnell released a similar graphic portraying Turkish ferrous scrap inbound traffic. Both the Turkish and Finnish charts show which companies shipped steel for recycling to Turkish ports, from which nations those vessels departed and what type of bulk cargo vessel carried the material.

While Turkey's investments in electric arc furnace (EAF) technology have made it a world leader in ferrous scrap buying, Finland’s roots as a stainless steel producer are tied more to Scandinavia’s iron and chromium mining resources.

However, major stainless steel producers in the region, including Finland-based Outokumpu and Sweden-based SSAB, have made and followed up on commitments to use sizable percentages of recycled metal to produce new stainless steel.

According to Navigate’s research, in 2024 Netherlands-based Oryx Group and Germany-based Cronimet Group were the companies that shipped the most stainless scrap to Finland, helping explain why those two countries are at the top of the national export rankings. Outokumpu now owns a stake in Cronimet.

Following Germany and the Netherlands as scrap shippers to Finland last year were Poland, Lithuania, the Czech Republic and the United States.

A full version of the Navigate Commodities Finland stainless scrap import chart can be found on Atilla Widnell’s LinkedIn page.