Ferro-tungsten prices will continue to trade in wider ranges this year amid a bearish outlook, market participants told Fastmarkets.
Material produced from scrap being shipped to the European market was the main reason for weak ferro-tungsten prices last year and the greater competition has caused traders to retreat from the spot market. Ferro-tungsten producers of standard material, which usually contains 75-85% tungsten, were forced to compete with more off-grade material in the spot market in the last year, market participants said. According to market sources, Chinese ferro-tungsten producer Hunan Litian High-tech Materials, which manufactures ferro-tungsten and tungsten alloys from metal scrap processing, was selling around 20-40 tonnes of material per month into Europe last year with some traders still sitting on big stocks of it. "Some traders...