March 2013 | Steel Raw Materials
Sentiment worsens: Iron Ore Highlights
Brazilian output has usually fallen in past first quarters, despite train disruptions.
On top of the Chinese government's determination to suppress inflationary pressures in the housing market, steel product prices have yet to see a recovery. This has curbed mills hopes of passing some of the higher raw material costs on to their clients.
Iron ore prices, we expect, will have further to fall later this month, particularly as the risk of shipments lost to bad weather in Australia and Brazil subsides and shipments return to their upward trend. January was a (relatively) bad month for shipments from Australia and, in February, Brazilian exports declined by 8.7% year-on-year to around 20.7m tonnes. We have yet to see preliminary data for Chinese imports in February, but December and January volumes were higher compared with the...
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