Nonferrous Scrap, the Netherlands

Things are still very quiet mainly due to the drop in prices. People are holding onto material. Aluminium is still going pretty well. That is kind of a constant. Copper spreads haven’t changed even though the prices have dropped because there is still have enough stock. That may change in the foreseeable future. They may see they may have to narrow their spreads a little bit. Generally there is not a lot of business between traders and bigger merchants. The business that is being done is generally from the smaller peddlers bringing material into the yards, which hasn’t really stopped.

Material is still coming into the yards. Manufacturing has been slow throughout so there hasn’t been significant amounts of material coming from production facilities. It appears that numbers have been made to look more optimistic than the economy really is.

Demand for aluminum as extrusions is there, but it is nothing spectacular. The slowdown is a continuation of the bad situation we have had since 2009. It looked like things had picked up as a matter of statistics shown by official channels to make it look like it is better than it is. There has been some improvement on the sentiment side but there is no actual improvement on the production side. I don’t really think that we have ever really come out of the crisis.

The Chinese should have come back into the market after the prices started dropping over the past three weeks. Demand will always be reasonably big from that end of the world, but I don’t think we will see the demand that we saw in 2009 come back. Chinese are very slow at the moment and they can pick and choose who they are going to buy from for the time being. I don’t think they will change anywhere in the near future. They are always creating an illusion of the Chinese coming back and pin hopes on that.

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Boris Bronneberg can be contacted at boris@source-montan.de.