A surge in China’s prices failed to stem steel exports in the first four months of the year, signaling that demand remains weak in the top user. Futures in Shanghai slumped by the exchange limit yesterday.
Shipments climbed to 36.9 million metric tonnes in the four months to last month, up 7.6 percent from a year earlier, according to data released by China’s General Administration of Customs on Sunday. Mills boosted exports even as prices of steel rebar in Shanghai advanced by more than 50 percent at one point this year to their highest level since September 2014.
Steel prices in China had rebounded from five years of losses as the economy stabilized, the property market improved and investors piled into raw material futures.
Photo: Reuters
Shipments of the raw material slid to 9.08 million tonnes last month from 9.98 million tonnes in March as a rally revived profit margins at some mills and curbed their need to seek increased income from markets outside the country.
Steel-product exports surged “despite a rebound of domestic steel prices, indicating that Chinese steel demand might be weaker than expected,” analysts, including Edward Morse at Citigroup Inc, wrote in a note dated yesterday.
Steel rebar, used to strengthen concrete, yesterday slumped by the exchange limit to 2,175 yuan (US$334) a tonne. Futures had surged to 2,787 yuan on April 21, the highest intraday level since September 2014, spurring bourses in China to take steps to curb a speculative frenzy in commodities.
Last year, steelmakers in China shipped a record 112 million tonnes overseas, sending the global market into a tailspin as profits and prices collapsed. This year, the sales might ease to 100 million tonnes as local demand strengthens, according to an estimate from the China Iron and Steel Association.
Iron ore imports last month totaled 83.92 million tonnes, compared with 85.77 million a month earlier, according to customs figures.
Over the first four months, purchases of ore were 325 million tonnes, about 6.1 percent more than in the same period last year. China is the world’s largest buyer of seaborne iron ore, and its mills account for about half of global steel supply.
ArcelorMittal, the biggest steel-producing company in China, last week cautioned that while it saw a broad recovery in the global market, Chinese prices might have overshot and could fall back.
Risks remained in China because fundamental overcapacity still existed, ArcelorMittal chief financial officer Aditya Mittal told reporters as the Luxembourg-based company reported a drop in quarterly earnings.
“Steel mills, skeptical of whether the high price is sustainable, continued to be keen to sell overseas,” said Wei Yingsong, an analyst at Mysteel Research.
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Singapore-based ride-hailing and delivery giant Grab Holdings’ planned acquisition of Foodpanda’s Taiwan operations has yet to enter the formal review stage, as regulators await supplementary documents, the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said yesterday. Acting FTC Chairman Chen Chih-min (陳志民) told the legislature’s Economics Committee that although Grab submitted its application on March 27, the case has not been officially accepted because required materials remain incomplete. Once the filing is finalized, the FTC would launch a formal probe into the deal, focusing on issues such as cross-shareholding and potential restrictions on market competition, Chen told lawmakers. Grab last month announced that it would acquire
Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) have repeatedly hit new highs, but an equity analyst said the stock’s valuation remains within a reasonable range and any pullback would likely be technical. The contract chipmaker’s historical price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio has ranged between 20 and 30, Cathay Futures Consultant Co (國泰證期) analyst Tsai Ming-han (蔡明翰) told Central News Agency. With market consensus projecting that TSMC would post earnings per share of about NT$100 (US$3.17) this year, supported by strong global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and the stock currently trading at a P/E ratio of below 25, Tsai said the valuation
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
RSS