The Italian beam and merchant bar markets are still experiencing strong upward pressure. Many producers are reported to have closed their sales in recent days, waiting to return to the market with new quotations that take into account the latest increases in scrap prices.
Players in the market state that at the moment it is not easy to give an exact market price. The quotation levels of a few days ago, which constituted historical records for these two products, appear to have been already surpassed. Steel producers, whose order books are fairly full and whose stock levels are low and uneven, have decided to close their sales for a few days in order to gauge the impact on their production costs of the scrap and billet price increases in the international markets. Even though the extent of the increase in store for beam and merchant bar prices remains unknown, the expectations of the market are for base quotations just below €600/mt ($945/mt) for beams and just under €500/mt ($787/mt) for merchant bars.
Traders stress that this latest move on the part of the producers comes at a less-than-brilliant conjuncture in Italy's domestic market; levels of end-user demand are not great and cash flow difficulties are widespread among customers. On top of all this, very agressive competition is observed between distributors which means that it is very hard for them to pass on increases to end-users.