The latest forecasts from Fastmarkets' team of analysts are ready to view.Bulk ferro-alloy prices have shown impressive gains again this month, with ferro-silicon, silicon metal and manganese alloy prices all making significant increases. Noble alloy markets also enjoyed upward momentum, with both vanadium and molybdenum prices rising sharply.Recovering demand from steelmakers globally, together w...Read More
The latest forecasts from Fastmarkets' team of analysts are ready to view.This month's key ferro-alloy forecast highlights:?EUR? Impressive advances in ore and alloy prices persisted in March, with most markets posting significant price gains. Strengthening demand from steelmakers along with supply shortages and depleted inventories in numerous markets, as well as freight and transportation...Read More
Inner Mongolia, China's ferro-chrome production heartland, has imposed restrictions on its metallurgical sector in a move that has fueled the high-carbon ferro-chrome markets in China and Europe, and although this may ease off, the gains were unlikely to be lost while alloy ramp-ups continue, sources have told Fastmarkets.The decision to restrict energy consumption in Inner Mongolia since December...Read More
The latest forecasts from Fastmarkets' team of analysts are ready to view.This month's key ferro-alloy forecast highlights:?EUR?In a strong start to the year, January saw ore and alloy pricing gains across all markets priced by Fastmarkets - with the exception of Chinese silicon metal export prices, which retreated slightly last month after posting impressive gains in December 2020.The combination...Read More
The latest forecasts and analysis of the ferrous scrap and iron metallics market from the Fastmarkets research team are ready to be viewed.Stifled automotive output this year, driven by a supply shortage of semiconductor chips used in vehicles, has tightened prime scrap availability and widened the spreads between this grade of steelmaking raw material and obsolete scrap.While wide prime-over-obso...Read More
The latest forecasts from Fastmarkets' team of analysts are ready to view.Fastmarkets analysts were invited to present our outlook for the coking coal market at Coaltrans Asia, held online on November 23-25. One of the key topics at the event was the trade tensions between China and Australia, which overtook Mongolia to become the largest coking coal exporter to China this year...Read More
The latest forecasts from Fastmarkets' team of analysts are ready to view.Iron ore remains the most bullish commodity of the year, with prices fuelled by Chinese demand and supply disruptions in Brazil, along with bullish sentiment. But prices are expected to come down because Brazilian exports have begun to recover, and have reached their highest level since the Brumadinho dam disaster in 2019. W...Read More
The latest forecasts from Fastmarkets' team of analysts are ready to view.In the iron ore market, supply issues including heavy rains at the start of the year, followed by staffing problems during the Covid-19 pandemic, have affected exports from Brazil. This has helped Australia gain a larger market share, but since June, Brazilian export volumes have returned to levels last seen before the...Read More
Stainless steel prices continue to register new highs around the end of the first half of 2021 and steelmakers continue to enjoy outsized margins.They have responded in recent months by increasing their output, which has now pushed above pre-pandemic levels and will eventually restore balance to the market.For now, though, supply gaps are still being filled and buyers find themselves competing aga...Read More
The latest forecasts from Fastmarkets' team of analysts is ready to view.Recent weeks have brought two key developments with regard to trade policy on stainless steel products that will be to the detriment of consumers.In China, the country's stainless steelmakers no longer enjoy a 13% export rebate as of May 1, reducing greatly their incentive to export and instead leading them to focus on supply...Read More
The latest forecasts from Fastmarkets' team of analysts is ready to view.Stainless steel prices and margins for stainless steel producers have risen notably over the past few months in both Europe and the United States, but there are now signs that the rally is petering out.A clear reason for the halt to rising prices comes from the near 20% drop in nickel prices seen in late February/early March,...Read More
The latest forecasts from Fastmarkets' team of analysts is ready to view.With nickel prices down by almost 20% over the space of around ten days during late February and early March, one might have been expecting us to be reporting sharply-lower prices of stainless steel, at least for the most common nickel-containing grades of stainless steel.This is not the case, at least in Europe and the Unite...Read More
First Cobalt has held preliminary discussions with Canadian government officials on the creation of a lithium-ion battery park on the same site as its battery materials hydrometallurgical refinery north of Toronto, the company said.The goal is to attract a precursor manufacturer to the site to recycle black mass from spent lithium-ion batteries, recovering nickel and cobalt in the process, it note...Read More
The European hot-rolled coil market remained quiet on Thursday July 15 on seasonally slow trading, with prices largely unchanged, supported by strong order books at steel mills and long lead times, sources told Fastmarkets.European buyers were still abstaining from making large bookings due to the still-high prices and sufficient stocks at most distributors. Exhausted credit lines were also limiti...Read More
Aluminium producer UC Rusal will pass through some of the Russian government's proposed export duty, scheduled to take effect in August, to its customers rather than absorb the entire tax, a source close to the company has confirmed.Aluminium market participants were bracing for the imposition of export duties on Russian material, after the country's government authorized the taxes on a range of m...Read More
PT Freeport has said it will continue with building a new copper smelter in Indonesia on its own, the latest twist in a saga that has run for almost a decade.The company, which is a subsidiary of US mining company Freeport McMoRan, will begin constructing a new smelter able to process 1.7 million tonnes of copper concentrates per year, its spokesperson Riza Pratama told Reuters on July...Read More
Import activity for copper cathodes into China rose on Thursday July 15, supported by improved arbitrage opportunity between London and Shanghai futures markets.The loss for importing the red metal into the country has been narrowing in the week to July 15. This, together with a rise of spot premiums in China's domestic copper market, buoyed buyers' profits. Fastmarkets' calculated the copper...Read More
Packaging company Ball Corporation is planning to build new plants in western Russia and in the East Midlands region of the UK, adding billions more cans per year to existing capacity from 2023, the company has said.Ball is based in the US state of Colorado. It said that increasing consumer demand for more sustainable purchasing options, and the adoption of cans by a growing number of new brands a...Read More
Chinalco Shanxi New Material Co suspended production on an alumina line at its refinery in Shanxi province last weekend, removing 500,000 tonnes per year from its annual output, sources told Fastmarkets on Thursday July 15.The subsidiary of the state-owned Aluminum Corporation of China (Chinalco), has an annual capacity of 2.5 million tpy - although that has been reduced to 1.7 million tpy since t...Read More
Hot-rolled coil prices in the United States remained near $91 per hundredweight ($1,820 per short ton) on Thursday July 15, one day after exceeding that threshold for the first time.Fastmarkets' daily steel hot-rolled coil index, fob mill US was calculated at $90.93 per cwt ($1,818.60 per ton) on July 15, down by 0.44% from $91.33 per cwt on Wednesday July 14 but up by 1.63% from $89.47 per cwt on...Read More