Posted on 28 Apr 2021
Suppliers have hiked billet export offers to Asia after a resumption of Chinese import buying last week, Kallanish notes.
Export offer prices for billet have reached $700/tonne cfr Manila this week, trading and importing sources say. These are heard for Vietnamese EAF and Indian blast furnace billet, traders say.
“Prices are going toward $690-700/t cfr Manila,” an importer says. He has an offer at $665/t cfr but he “doubts the reliability” of the offer. Another buyer says on Tuesday that he was still getting offers of $660-685/t cfr from different origins. Offers for Russian and Indian blast furnace billet were at $655-665/t cfr Manila last Friday.
The offers at over $660/t are presumably from Indian induction furnace mills, a Manila trader says. He thinks that Russian material could also be possibly priced at this level.
“Russian billet cannot compete head-on with ASEAN billet in China,” he notes. Due to a 2% import duty waiver, ASEAN billet fetch higher export prices than non-ASEAN billet. The import duty is zero for all origin billet including Russian imports into the Philippines. The smaller sized Russian billet which are sold to the Philippines also do not find a ready market in China, where 150mm billet is popular.
Several traders say that Vietnamese and Indonesian billet have been booked earlier this week at $680/t cfr China and fresh offers have now been hiked to $685-690/t cfr China. A trader heard billet from Qatar sold at over $660/t cfr China this week. However, Chinese trading sources are unable to confirm latest deals at this price level. A Chinese trader who received an offer for Saudi billet similar to the Qatar offer says that he doubts that it was taken up. "But there's always speculators," he notes.
Last week, Chinese bookings of Malaysian and Indonesian origin blast furnace 150mm billet reached $675/tonne cfr, and for non-ASEAN billet including Indian billet at $648-650/t cfr
Source:Kallanish
