Increasing steel production rates in Japan are making Japanese yards increasingly reluctant to offer cargoes to China, market sources told Fastmarkets this week.
Better margins to be found in Japan's domestic marketTaiwan continues to chase containerized cargoesContainer scrap offers to Bangladesh fall amid sluggish demandChina
A slowdown in downstream demand has continued to weight on spot demand for imported ferrous scrap in the China import market.
Buyer sources and traders continued to indicate bids at $530 per tonne cfr China for imported cargoes, with no incentive for Chinese steel mills to increase their bids amid low confidence in the downstream markets.
"This is especially so for long steel, which has seen trading volumes slow down in both the physical and futures markets," a scrap trader in Singapore told Fastmarkets.
Japanese scrapyards are increasingly reluctant to offer cargoes to China amid increasing steel production...