NONFERROUS SCRAP>>THE NETHERLANDS, EUROPE>>Boris Bronneberg, Source Montan Handels
It is very mixed; in some areas it is quiet throughout. You can’t always identify which item is going well at which time. The southeast of Europe is quiet. Some export items are not going that fast, although some buyers are still quite active.
Local consumers are really pretty well filled in terms of inventory. Many comment that the sale of product had been good so far [in 2010], but it is now declining at this point. So there is not much interest in increasing production figures for the time being, and there is not much demand for raw materials. It’s rather quiet more than busy.
The busy companies are usually the smaller ones at the moment. The lull is here now, earlier in the year than it sometimes arrives. Smaller companies are still busy collecting, but industry-wide it is quiet. There is not now a heavy volume of metal production; many companies are not that busy. They are either sitting on stocks or are just not getting enough orders to fill the books. It’s definitely quiet across the board.
For metals producers and scrap exporters, the lower euro should be a positive. The crisis creates more of a psychological impact or an investor issue than what the effects really are.
Boris Bronneberg can be contacted at boris@source-montan.de.
NONFERROUS SCRAP>>WESTERN EUROPE, ITALY>>Fernando Duranti, Leghe & Metalli
The mood at the BIR was brightened in part by good weather, a beautiful hotel and setting in Istanbul, and good attendance—some 1,300 people. The meetings and the trading areas were very lively; people were talking, discussing and negotiating, but not many great deals were being made.
People were quite optimistic on the whole; I did not note any pessimism. It looked as though things would change for the better, according to the majority of people attending. They did not think business could be done that day, but everyone was convinced that business sooner or later would pick up and work up to higher levels.
Buyers from Chinese and Indians companies keep saying they need scrap. Buyers from smaller Asian companies were also battling to meet new people and new suppliers. On the whole, though, very little was done business-wise.
People were expecting June to start a pick-up in metals production, but I think they’ve postponed that to July if not September or October—right after summer. People trading within the paper industry said it was doing quite well, and plastics are moving quite well.
Stainless scrap is just going strong enough to consider itself as probably the number one item that is heading for a good summer, I would say. But the last two days have ruined some of those optimistic ideas because of the downfall of prices on the LME. But that looks as if it’s going to pick back up, depending on activities and actions concerning growth in certain countries in Europe.
Fernando Duranti can be contacted at fernandoduranti@leghemetalli.it.
NONFERROUS SCRAP>>RUSSIA>> Ildar Neverov, Scrap Market Ltd.
The stainless market is completely dead in terms of export. Prices have just gone down recently, and too rapidly. That’s why there is no international trade just now in stainless steel scrap.
However, we have seen some domestic deliveries because mills in Russia need stainless steel scrap. These mills are developing new capacities and new metallurgical processes to use more scrap.
The nonferrous business is also stopped because of the LME price volatility. So I think we are experiencing a very quiet period at the time in terms of international trading—there is no active trading.
Supply is greater than demand now here in Russia. There is too much scrap in the country and it is more than enough for the demand. There is nothing new taking place in export restrictions for nonferrous scrap and nothing is going to change in the future.
Ildar Neverov can be contacted at siberiametals@bk.ru.