Navigate initiates billet trade tracking feature

Navigate Commodities has begun to track export flows of steel slabs and billets departing form more than a half dozen nations.

Navigate, based in Singapore, started up earlier this decade as a metals industry information service that uses proprietary maritime and satellite technology that allows users to monitor the trading activity of its clients, competitors and vendors in real-time.

Managing Director Atilla Widnell embarked on a two-month “road show” earlier this year to meet with current and prospective steel, raw materials and metal recycling industry customers, which he documented on LinkedIn.

In mid-July, on LinkedIn, Widnell wrote, “This was the one constant request I received on our two-month global roadshow: Can you also track billet and slab shipments to Turkey in real time?”

During his tour, Widnell says he told customers Navigate did not consider such a service was possible.

Now, however, Widnell says Navigate Commodities can track and update every four hours steel billet and semifinished slab (semis) cargoes arriving in Turkey that have departed from eight nations: Algeria, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Oman, Russia, Ukraine and Vietnam.

Widnell says the tracking information provides insight that otherwise might not arrive until reports are issued by Turkish customs officials one month or more later.

For metal recyclers and others in the steel raw materials chain, the global flow of slabs and billet can tip off to what extent rolling mills in Turkey are going to rely on recycled-content steel made in nearby electric arc furnaces or whether they have decided to roll slabs or billet produced outside the country.

“To know which Turkish steel mills have legitimately received a billet and/or slab cargo and [are] planning to defer purchases of deep sea bulk ferrous scrap cargoes in order to reroll semis [is] satellite-based commodity data and trading analytics at its finest,” Widnell writes.

Widnell and Navigate also have teamed up with the London Metal Exchange (LME) to release a bimonthly “Steel Scrap Markets – a Bird’s Eye View” report.

In the July edition of that report, Navigate and the LME write, “Turkish mills continued to suppress melt schedules due to weak construction activity and prohibitively high project financing costs. The arrival of competitively priced Asian (China, Malaysia and Indonesia) billets and slabs (semis) capped ferrous scrap price gains as mills considered substituting scrap with imported semis.”