Indian export offers for high grade iron ore fines (with Fe content of 63.5 percent and higher) have) overcome mid-week downside pressures of correction and have increased by $2.61/mt to $115.96/mt CFR China amid contradictory market pulls of supply side pressures on one hand and weakness in finished steel prices on the other, traders said on Friday, July 19.
“Some amount of cooling down of iron ore offers has been expected and this has been evident from mid-week correction in offer levels. The intermittent correction was triggered by weak finished steel prices. But iron ore have continued to be supported by tight supplies from global miners. Traders representing Chinese steel mills are seen to be booking large volumes at every dip in offer levels triggering a rebound,” an Odisha based miner-exporter said.
“In the local market, apprehensions of sharp fall in exportable surplus during the monsoon season too has somewhat dispelled. The monsoon rains during the past two months have been scanty in most of the mining belt and hence disruptions to production and supplies might not be as much as feared and aggregating traders have been able to re-stock at port stock yards without much problem, mitigating any supply side pressures on offer levels,” he added.
According to two other traders, despite periodic surfacing to correction and dips in offer levels, downside risks are limited and preference for low grade, high alumina content Indian iron ore fines was still strong among traders representing Chinese steel mills.
They said that market estimated the total stockpile of low grade iron ore fines (Fe content 58 percent and above but below 63.5 percent) at beginning of the year was around 150 million mt of which about 40 percent had been liquidated over the past two months since raw material prices got onto a bull run.