Indian export offers for high grade iron ore fines (with Fe content of 63.5 percent and higher) have continued to seek a bottom, consolidating below the $70 mark, losing $1-2/mt during the past week to the range of $69-70/mt CFR China, traders said on Wednesday, December 10.
"Export offers at current levels are unviable for miners and traders. It is only a matter of time before even small transaction volumes vanish from the market as offers seek a new bottom level every week," an Orissa-based miner-exporter said.
"Apart from the absence of any significant buying depressing offer levels, most futures markets for steelmaking raw materials were not holding up, further worsening the negative outlook for iron ore," he said.
"Traders who are basically aggregators of volumes from mines have virtually deserted the market as current offers do not ensure any margins for them. Only a handful of miner-exporters are active concluding very small transaction volumes from their pithead stocks to keep cash flows going," he added.
Market sources said that much of the week they have seen sideways movement in offers as tentative restocking moves by Chinese steel mills were not sustained and technical downsides proved too strong, which forced buyers to draw back from concluding large transactions.