Statistics show that Chinese domestic billet price continues to decrease this week. Construction steel prices fell in general in East China and Central region. For example common carbon billet is CNY 3900 per tonne to CNY 3950 per tonne and 20MnSi billet is CNY 4020 per tonne, down by CNY 130 per tonne to CNY 280 per tonne compared to that of last week.
Hebei province saw such decrease this week and the largest accumulated billet price drop was CNY 330 per tonne to CNY 380 per tonne.
In East china, steel mills are in wait and see attitude so they had small purchases on billet. Although billet price decreases continuously billet volume is small in market. Some slab factories in East China declined EXW price by CNY 170 per tonne but still cannot attract downstream manufacturers and similar situation occurred in Hebei province that slab factories there decreased their slab EXW price by CNY 150 per tonne. Despite of this, some steel mills with better inventories stop purchase temporarily and continue to keep down the price of billet however traders refuse to sell in too low price and choose to wait.
Analyst said that because price of powdered iron is less likely to decrease continuously so cost of billet factories is still high. Affected by some uncertainties in macro situation, slight consolidation will be predominant in billet market in short term.