Juan Weik
META BULLETIN - July 05, 2017
Iranian steel billet has been quietly gaining market acceptance in Southeast Asia because of its low prices, just as it happened with China-origin product a few years ago, but can it dominate the region?
META BULLETIN - July 05, 2017
Iranian steel billet has been quietly gaining market acceptance in Southeast Asia because of its low prices, just as it happened with China-origin product a few years ago, but can it dominate the region?
In the past several months, transactions involving Iranian
billet had been concluded on and off in Southeast Asia
– the world’s largest import region for
the semi-finished steel product – at $10-15 per tonne
below prices of cargoes of other origin. Until recently,
Thailand was the only country that regularly imported billet
from Iran in this part of the world. But the low prices of
cargoes from the Middle Eastern country have piqued the
interest of buyers in places such as Malaysia and Indonesia.
"It’s just too cheap to ignore," one buyer source
in Southeast Asia told Metal Bulletin. This is strikingly
similar to the story of Chinese billet, which first attracted
the attention of a handful of importers in the Philippines
around the end of 2013 and beginning of 2014 before spreading
to the entire region, displacing shipments from South Korea,
Russia and other countries in the process. Loopholes The
similarities between Chinese...
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