Steel Plate Dealers Seek Price Hike Timing, Tokyo

Steel plate dealers and shearing processors seek the timing to raise the reselling price around Tokyo. The market price is around 87,000 yen per tonne for standard sized products with 19 millimeters thickness, 5 feet width and 10 feet length and around 95,000 yen for cut processed materials. The dealers haven’t reflected steel makers’ price hike on the reselling price due to the weak demand.

Steel plate demand keeps stagnant mainly for construction and civil engineering. The demand recovery is also slow from manufacturing industry. Cut processed material demand seems recovering from construction machines but the demand volume is 50-60% level compared with the recent peak in April-September 2008.

Plate shearing processors’ inventory was 84,753 tonnes at the end of February, which decreased by 40.5% from a year earlier and represented the year-to-year minus for 7 straight months, according to the national association. The inventory to shipment rate lowered by 39.3 percentage points to 151.9%. The inventory rate returned to the moderate level.

Steel structural fabricators, the users of cut processed materials, are in severe price competitions. A shearing processor said the reselling price should be raised gradually. Some plate dealers eye the timing of the price hike at around Japanese long holidays in early May, when high price products start to arrive at the dealers.