The Iranian government has finally agreed to allocate loans to local rolling mills to be used to import billets.
Iranian rolling mills have been suffering from a billet shortage as the output produced locally is insufficient for all rolling mills in Iran, which have consequently been obliged to work at less than half capacity. Meanwhile, local rolling mills have been unable to satisfy their needs in billets via imports due to the continued rise in prices of imported billets and also due to the financial problems experienced by the mills.
For the past couple of years, Iranian longs rolling mills have been asking their government to allocate loans for billet imports.