OREANDA-NEWS. January 23, 2012. China Steel Corporation (CSC) held the domestic pricing meeting for 2012 March shipments and announced the following statement: Although European debt crisis still casts impact on the world economy, the U.S. economy performance seems to be better than expected. Besides, due to the inflation slowdowns in China and other emerging countries, monetary policies of these countries turned looser, reported the press-centre of CSC.

The world economy is expected to grow moderately under support of the outperformance of the U.S. and the emerging economies. Though Taiwan is experiencing a weakened exports growth, the government still looks forward to a 4.19% economic growth rate in 2012. Moreover, it believes that there will be a continuous rise up after 2012 Q1.

As the international scrap price soared, European and USA mills raised the steel prices to reflect costs. USA HRC spot price goes up by USD 20-30/MT. Besides, since Asian mills cut production, the diminished supply-demand gap has made Chinese, Japanese and Korean mills raise the export prices successively. Particularly, last year low steel prices pushed most Chinese mills’ year-end profits in the red and forced them to cut production. As a result, Baosteel and WISCO decided to raise the steel price or keep it unchanged for February shipments. International steel prices started to rebound.

Although domestic demand of downstream industry remains subdued before Chinese lunar New Year, export demand starts to recover as the international steel prices rise. As domestic steel prices have bottomed out, the restocking demand is expected to increase after Chinese lunar New Year. Besides, thanks to ECFA early harvest, import duties of many steel products would be revoked in 2012, increasing the competitiveness of Taiwan steel products. Although the international steel prices rise recently, in order to enhance the competitiveness of downstream customers, CSC has decided to keep steel prices unchanged for March shipments.