Posted on 11 Aug 2023
Vietnam’s Hoa Phat Group will upgrade a blast furnace at its plant in the northern province of Hai Duong, Kallanish understands.
Work on the approximately 1 million tonnes/year capacity furnace, which will be expanded to 1.4m t/y, is scheduled to take place next month. The upgrade designed to increase billet production was scheduled a long time ago, an informed source says.
The shutdown, scheduled to last for three months, will have a “small” effect on the market, a mill manager in southern Vietnam says. Hoa Phat will accumulate enough billet inventory before shutting down to continue sales, he adds.
“Steel demand is extremely bad in Vietnam,” a trader says on the current construction steel market. Demand is seasonally weak in the third quarter and there will be “some improvement in Q4, but we have a difficult market, so we are not sure”, a mill manager opines. The Hai Duong steelworks has three blast furnaces and installed 2.2m t/y capacity for construction long products including rebar, wire rod and billet.
Meanwhile, the rebar import market is stable this week in Singapore. Suppliers are maintaining offers at unchanged levels.
Theoretical-weight rebar from Malaysia is offered at $550/tonne delivered by truck (dap) to Singapore, or $550/t cfr Singapore, down from $555/t dap last week. There are also offers from traders for open, unspecified-origin rebar at $545/t cfr Singapore, for shipment in November/December.
A full vessel of 40,000-50,000 tonnes of rebar from Oman was heard to have concluded around 31 July at $545-550/t cfr Singapore. At that time, the market was stronger compared to current market conditions, trading sources in Singapore say. Kallanish assessed BS4449 500B 10-40mm diameter rebar at $540-545/t cfr Singapore theoretical weight, unchanged on-week.
Source:Kallanish
