Posted on 19 Jun 2018
Tokyo Steel Manufacturing, Japan's leading electric arc furnace mill, announced Monday it would not change its domestic list prices for July, while waiting for market prices to rise further.
This decision meant that the company's list prices for SS400 senior-sized H-beams will remain at Yen 89,000/mt ($806/mt) for July and SPHC 1.7-22mm hot-rolled coils at Yen 74,000/mt ($670/mt).
Tokyo Steel's managing director Kiyoshi Imamura said that market prices have been increasing slowly but not enough to catch up with the previous hikes by producers. The company had increased its list prices five times since September and by a total of Yen 12,000-14,000/mt.
Imamura said that the rise in market price was slower than expected, while demand had been firm and was expected to increase further from summer onwards.
"We believe the size of demand after summer is expected to be larger than those in previous years at the same period, we will monitor the market trend and decide our price policy for next month," he said.
Imamura also said production costs have been increasing and the company needed to pass the increase to product prices at the early stage.
Tokyo Steel planned to produce a total 240,000 mt of finished products in June, unchanged from May.
It planned to produce 100,000 mt of H-beam and 110,000 mt of HRC production in June. It also planned to produce 10,000 mt of plate, all unchanged from May.
The company is currently receiving bids for its H-beam at around $670-$680/mt FOB and for HRC at $630-$650/mt FOB, unchanged from a month ago. Imamura said inquiries from oversea customers had been active and that it intended to produce about 30,000 mt of HRC for export in June, up 10,000 mt from May.
