Free website content for steel webmasters

Steel industry portal http://www.steelonthenet.com/ has launched a free 'plugin' tool offering webmasters the ability to display international steel sector news on their websites.

The steel news plugin is available free from http://www.steelonthenet.com/plugin.html

Installation requires a simple cut and paste - and can be completed in about 30 seconds. Websites with the plugin tool will display steel sector press releases which are updated automatically.

For more information, or to see the plugin in action, please visit http://www.steelonthenet.com/plugin.html

Andrzej M Kotas
Chief Executive
[email protected]

I see an interesting tidbid on the site:

"The price and availability of scrap has increasingly become an issue with the highest prices being paid by the Chinese. China is the second largest importer of ferrous scrap in the world and the reported import price of carbon steel scrap is 240 to 250 US$ per tonne. This is 40 to 50 US$ per tonne above the German and French imported price. The German metals trading association, VDM, said that the shortage of scrap due to high demand from China remains a considerable burden on the German metals market which will not diminish in the long term (Metal Bulletin, 1 May). A spokesman said that Chinese companies are setting up trading offices in Europe to secure scrap to be sent back to China where it can be processed at a cheaper cost than competitors on the continent.

China bought 25% of its scrap in 2005 from the USA..."

10 years ago you could buy second rate sheet steel for the current scrap price the Chinese are paying.

Yeah, and when my dad was a kid, movies cost a nickel.

But steel prices are commodity prices, and they are based BOTH on the actual demand for the commodity, and all those commodity brokers who are essentially gambling on price increases and decreases in the future.

The thing I find interesting is how much effect, if any, there is when Politics bangs its head up against The Market Place.
For instance, the chinese are simultaneously at the mercy of the world market, and trying to manipulate it.
They are trying to use their high demand to set 1 yr contracts at low prices for future iron ore consumption, partially by only trading futures on Chinese exchanges.
So far, anyway, they have not been too successful.

I find it interesting that simultaneously with the chinese becoming the second largest importer of scrap, virtually the ONLY bright spot in US steel production in the last 30 years has been the building of mills that use electric arc furnaces to reprocess scrap.
So at the same time they want more of it, we are exporting less-
For instance, Schnitzer, the big auto junkyard company, has their own rebar mill in McMinnville Oregon, and ALL of their scrap autos, (and they own something like 90 junkyards) gets remelted in house, in the USA, and then resold in the USA as rebar.
They make more money, China gets less scrap.
The average Nucor mill in the USA likes to keep 1 Million tons of scrap on hand at any given time, and there are 10 or 15 of them.

So part of the scrap shortage is because we actually recycle MUCH MORE of our own scrap these days.

I wish the Chinese would come to my house and haul away some scrap.