Despite the Romanian long steel market's gloomy outlook due to substantially reduced demand, particularly this week caused by bad weather and continuing liquidity issues, Romanian long steel traders and the sole domestic rebar producers kept their offers unchanged week on week. Furthermore, the sole rebar producer's press announcement this week concerning its present financial difficulties and the ongoing unfair competition from imports shows the market picture will not improve soon. Market participants, however, claim that, although the local market is still in a weak state with negative factors, the domestic producer is not greatly impacted and that the main aim of its announcement was to spur the government to take some action.
“The weather this week is terrible. We had a fair bit of snow in certain places and cold temperatures, which affected things more than usual. As a result, only orders that were already placed were delivered, and very few new orders were placed, which is why prices remained stable,” a large trader told SteelOrbis
This week's offers from the domestic producer have remained stable week on week at €580-590/mt ex-work. Similarly, most Romanian rebar traders have kept their offers unchanged week on week at around €590-605/mt ex-warehouse.
As for the wire rod market, most dealers have quoted stable offers week on week at €570-585/mt ex-warehouse.
Furthermore, there have been some import offers this week, though interest from Romanian traders has remained minimal. According to sources, offers for rebar from Bulgaria have remained unchanged at around €615-625/mt CPT since last week. Furthermore, rebar and wire rod offers from Greece have been quoted at €645/mt CFR and €635/mt CFR, respectively. Turkish rebar offers to Romania, on the other hand, based on mill prices of $560-570/mt FOB, freight costs of $25-30/mt, and the current exchange rate of €1 = $1.04, should be at about €560-575/mt CFR, down from €565-580/mt CFR last week. Meanwhile, similar to the previous week, the Egyptian supplier is still not giving offers and is likely to resume offering for the second quarter by the end of the month.