Italy’s scrap market stabilizes after increases in early March

During the past week, scrap quotations in the Italian domestic market have generally been stable, with only minimal price upticks in particular for premium qualities. Current average domestic scrap prices in Italy are as follows:

*Prices are delivered to customer, excluding VAT

While scrap prices have followed a sideways trend in the past week, actual purchase prices are quite diverse based on the spending disposition of buyers and the availability of certain scrap qualities. Steelmakers have been tending to slim down their scrap stocks for a while now and have been buying new raw materials only in order to maintain smelting activity. Meanwhile, collection of new arising scrap has been slowing down in line with Italian industrial activity and is not expected to improve until the Italian economy shakes off its current sluggishness.

As regards exports, SteelOrbis sources report good scrap demand from abroad, even if export quotations are not always as attractive as domestic quotations.

Libya deserves special mention. After last year's turmoil, European scrap traders started to compete with each other over the large steel scrap volumes left behind in the wake of the recent civil war. The provisional government of Libya then took the step of banning exports of metal scrap, instead preferring to smelt scrap locally and cast it into semi-finished products (billets) in order to export value-added products. However, many buyers do not want to purchase billets which appear to lack sufficient guarantees for conformity with EU standards.