Saturday,May 28,
The shipyards at Alang witnessed a drop in business. The fall is due to competition from Bangladesh, which resumed ship-breaking operations at around 60 of its 110 ship-breaking slots from April after getting conditional permission from a Bangladesh court, which had banned ship-breaking activity for almost 10 months on environmental issues”.
Bangladeshi shipyards are bidding aggressively for ships and are offering up to $20/mt more than their Indian counterparts are. Due to this competitive step by Bangladesh, scrap production fell to 139,596 tonnes in April from 302,356 tonnes in March.
Scrap plates are a substitute of ingot and used by Mini steel mills for rolling in to finished products Availability of plates is scarce and thus the mini mill owners have to use ingot for making finished products. This has lent support to the struggling ingot market and the impact of this transition is clearly visible in the ingot prices. Ingot prices moved up by Rs 500/mt in the short span of 2 days.And the conditions for ingot manufacturers will remain favorable till the supply of scrap plates scale up to pre-April levels.
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