Shrinking demand from the downstream steel sector and the looming expansion of ferro-niobium capacity are likely to be headwinds to Chinese vanadium consumption, Morgan Wu, managing director of Chinese vanadium supplier Hangten Asia, said.
A reduction in infrastructure spending in China in 2019 is likely to cause the vanadium market to slow, Wu said during a panel discussion at Fastmarkets' Asian Ferro-alloys Conference in Hong Kong on Monday March 10.Wu noted a significant difference in policies aimed at improving the Chinese economy from the country's National People's Congress (NPC) on March 5-15 compared with previous years."The latest policies are about cutting tax and saving costs. There is almost no [significant] infrastructure encouragement this year," Wu told delegates.According to unconfirmed reports from the NPC, Beijing is mulling a...