China Steel Corp (CSC, 中鋼), Taiwan’s largest steelmaker, has no plan to cut its domestic steel prices in July and August as the company expects prices to recover in the second half of the year, the Chinese-language United Evening News reported yesterday.
A recent rebound in global flat steel product prices, which also pushed up domestic steel trade prices by between NT$500 and NT$1,000 per tonne, has provided China Steel, which cut its June prices at the end of last month, with plenty of orders, the newspaper said.
“China Steel is more likely to adjust its June and August prices upward than downward. China Steel cannot widen its loss,” China Steel executive vice president and spokesman Chung Lo-min (鍾樂民) was quoted as saying.
China Steel will announce its July and August prices at the beginning of next month.
Meanwhile, Sinosteel Corp (中國中鋼集團) president Huang Tianwen (黃天文) was scheduled to visit China Steel’s operations in Kaohsiung yesterday afternoon.
China’s state-owned Sinosteel is a long-term supplier of fire bricks and other materials to China Steel, and top executives from both firms have visited each other before, Chung said.
Chung said on the agenda for Huang’s visit was a discussion of the supply of steel raw materials and the possibility of further cooperation.
The two firms are unlikely to acquire stakes in each other in the short term, but do not rule out forming a company overseas to collaborate on the acquisition of raw materials as part of China Steel’s efforts to stabilize its raw material sources, Chung said.
On the future of steel prices, the paper quoted Huang as saying that, based on the demand in the first four months of this year, China’s demand for steel products was expected to reach between 480 million and 500 million tonnes this year.
Huang said China’s demand for steel would become the backbone of the global steel market.
He also projected that the steel market would gradually recover in the second half of this year, but said it would be difficult for steel prices to return to what they were before the global financial crisis began.
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