“Some steel mills in East, North and Northeast China clipped output in response to the elevated controls on power usage announced by local governments coping with severe power shortages,” a Shanghai-based market watcher explained.
Moreover, some mills in these areas also stopped operations to conduct scheduled maintenance on their blast furnaces, with some 15 blast furnaces taken offline this week, according to her.
As a result, the surveyed mills’ daily consumption of imported iron ore dropped by 8,300 t/d on week to 2.65 million t/d on average during the period, according to Mysteel’s data. This weakening of demand saw Mysteel SEADEX 62% Australian Fines decrease by $7.35/dmt on week to $118.3/dmt CFR Qingdao as of October 21.
By October 21, inventories of imported ore in all forms at the 247 mills, including ore sitting at steelworks, port stockyards and on the water, edged up for the second week by another 572,500 tonnes on week to 104.3 million tonnes – sufficient for 39.37 days of their consumption, or 0.34 day longer on week.
Over the same survey period, Mysteel’s smaller-scale study of run-rates at 163 steel plants showed that their blast furnace capacity utilization rate had nudged down as well for the second week, declining by 2.26 percentage points on week to 62.16% as of October 21, the data show.
Written by Lindsey Liu, liulingxian@mysteel.com
This article has been published under an article exchange agreement between Mysteel Global and SteelMint.
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