Ferrous Scrap >> Italy, Europe>> Dr. Laila Matta, Trans Commodities Italia SRL
The “excitement” we had during the last two weeks in August and the first week of September has faded away already. The increase in prices we registered in August on scrap and pig iron has been welcomed as a general market recovery. In fact the announcements of increases on finished-product prices as well (flat and long products) seem to be a natural consequence of an optimistic market trend.
At the beginning of September, everybody was looking forward to a demand responding to sellers' expectations to recover the almost dead one we had in May/June.
Unfortunately the optimism appears now not really grounded: buyers are reluctant to accept the increase in prices because of the instability of the market. There is still low consumption and high risks that prices may go down again.
The positive market trend in Germany has not yet seemed to affect Italy and Spain. Prices may stay at the present level for the time being with the possibility of them going down again should the demand not recover as it is supposed to.
Laila Matta can be reached at lmatta@tcmilano.it.
Ferrous Scrap>> Russia and CIS>> Andrey Balashov, TYOR Commercial Inc.
In general, prices are going down. Mills got enough scrap to date to power their needs and even to start building some winter stock. They are keeping prices speculative. We see no delays in payments. So things are going quite well for the steel industry in Russia, but we see some signs that are not so good for the world markets of steel. We know that Turkish mills are having problems with selling steel and this problem has occurred in Russian mills also. Stocks are not weak. Stocks of collectors and exporters are not so weak, but also there isn’t much scrap [generated] nowadays.
Today there is no market to export, more or less. Some container shipments are in place, but in general, Turkey is closed. Spain is closed.
Material is coming into the yards, and for now stocks are increasing. Some steel mills still have the demand for scrap and still have finished product inquiries. We also expect more production of the scrap in the coming month.
We are looking at steel prices and everything depends on that. Maybe the situation will be better after this recent correction, and so the prices are going to restore. Business will be better for sure. We also know that steel mills in Turkey and in Spain are sitting without any stock, so they’ll need scrap. The only problem is they don’t want to pay how much they should pay for it.
From a professional point of view, Spain does have enough money to buy. The problem is you have to have enough of a margin to pay today’s prices, and at the moment they don’t because they cannot sell their products at a high enough price to cover the cost.
Andrey Balashov of TYOR Commercial can be contacted at scrap@tyor.ru.