China: BF mills' capacity use rises for 3rd week

MySteel: Production enthusiasm among Chinese blast furnace (BF) steelmakers continued to pick up this week as domestic steel prices moved higher overall, allowing more mills to shrug off heavy losses, Mysteel's latest survey showed.

During 13 -19 September, the BF capacity utilisation rate among the 247 steel producers under Mysteel's regular tracking increased for the third straight week by another 0.17 percentage point on week to reach 84.06%, with their daily average hot metal production growing by 0.2% on week to 2.24 million tonnes (mnt)/day (d).

During the same period, the operational rates among these sampled mills also went up by 0.6 percentage point from the previous week to 78.23%, the survey showed.

"The recovered profit margins encouraged more steelmakers to bring their idled furnaces back on stream," a market watcher based in Shanghai said.

As of 19 September, the national spot price for HRB400E 20mm diameter rebar was assessed by Mysteel at yuan 3,376/tonne ($478.5/t) including the 13% VAT, higher by 1.2% on week. By the same day, around 10% of the 247 BF mills under Mysteel's survey could earn some profits on steel sales, higher by some 4 percentage points from a week earlier.

In parallel with the growth in hot metal production, the daily consumption of imported iron ore among the same 247 mills also increased by 0.5% from the previous week to reach 2.77 mnt/d over 13-19 September, according to Mysteel's survey.

Meanwhile, as steelmakers could not make large iron ore purchases during the Mid-Autumn Festival holiday over 15-17 September when most traders closed their businesses, the stockpiles of the feed ore among these mills declined, Mysteel Global noted.

As of 19 September, the total inventories of imported iron ore in all forms held by the 247 mills fell by 0.6% on week to reach 90.3 mnt, which would be sufficient to last them for 32.6 days at their current usage rate, shorter by 0.4 day than the previous period, Mysteel assessed.

Note: This article has been written in accordance with an article exchange agreement between MySteel Global and BigMint.