SteelMint’s India Steel Composite Index declined by 1.18% to 189.5 this week. Slow demand weighed on prices of both flat and long steel products during the week.
The index is backed by robust calculation methods and is derived from the long steel and flat steel composite indices. It serves as a benchmark for end-users, EPC contractors, and manufacturers in the iron and steel industry for settling contracts or understand the market cost of physical supply of commodities such as rebar, wire rods, structurals, HRCs, CRCs, plates and galvanised plates.
- The Composite Index is assessed on a weekly basis: every Friday at 18:30 IST, as per the weighted average prices based on manufacturing capacity and production.
- SteelMint considers the Composite Index with the base year being 3 Jan’20 (financial year 2019-2020) and the base value as 100.
- The Composite Index doesn’t give the absolute price.
- The Indian steel industry is broadly classified into the BF-BOF and the electric/induction furnace routes. Keeping this broad classification in view, SteelMint proposes to release the Composite Index by considering both production routes by manufacturing capacity and the production weighted method to compute the index for India. For details click to view the methodology document.'[
The flat steel index stood at 194.6 after a 1.6% decline on the week. Trades in both domestic and overseas markets continued to remain slow and weighed on trade market prices across product categories.
Trade participants are waiting for some relaxation in the form of discounts or rebates by the steel producers and are sticking to needs-based procurement. Moreover, trade activities remained slow.
Furthermore, on the export front HRC (S275) offers to the EU edged down to $1,130-1,140/t CFR, as buying interest was impacted by concerns around opening of credit lines with banks. Meanwhile, export offers for HRC (SAE1006) to the UAE dropped to $950-980/t CFR this week.
The long steel index edged down by 0.8% to 184.6 over slowdown in demand for both induction furnace (IF) and blast furnace (BF) route long steel products. The infrastructure sector has been concerned about the price levels of not only steel but also other raw materials. Infrastructure consumption is minimal and needs-based at present.
“Though projects buy from the mills directly, we did experience some downward price adjustments from the mills lately as sales are down,” informed a source with a leading domestic infrastructure construction company.
Leave a Reply