[notice] London Metal Exchange (LME) is closed today and next Monday

At present, there are 24 iron and steel joint enterprises in Shanxi, China. In 2021, the pig iron output was 59.884 million mt, a year-on-year decrease of 1.6%; Crude steel output was 67.407 million mt, up 1.6% year-on-year; The output of steel products was 61.739 million mt, which was basically the same as that of the previous year.

Under the influence of the increasingly severe pandemic, the epidemic prevention policy in domestic ports was strict, while the unloading capacity of terminals was restricted and the efficiency of cargo handling was reduced.

Today, the spot prices of all series of stainless steel products in Foshan stood flat today. The average price of the 300 series product was around 18,000 yuan/mt. The market received a large number of goods last week, while the demand failed to keep up. The downstream users continued to purchase on rigid demand after the prices rebounded slightly yesterday.

China’s rare earth mining and smelting/separation quotas stood at 168,000 mt and 162,000 mt respectively in 2021, according to the Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT).

The spot supply was relatively tight in the stainless steel market.

On 13 December, Baosteel Desheng took the lead in issuing the Initiative on Jointly Maintaining the Order of the 200-Series Market and Regulating Market Behaviour and committed to cut the output of 200-series products from the perspective of balancing market demand and supply, by maintaining only one blast furnace in production by March 2022 in an effort to scale back the overall supply by more than 60%.

The prices of 300-series cold-rolled stainless steel fell significantly again in Foshan today. A steel mill in south China lowered the prices sharply.

According to SMM survey, the domestic stainless steel output totalled 2.22 million mt in September, a drop of 590,000 mt or 20.97% month on month, and down 19.75% year on year.

Shanghai base metals traded mixed after opening on Thursday morning, as Fed failed to set a timeline for tapering asset purchase, and COVID-19 pandemic made a comeback. Meanwhile, their counterparts on LME mostly went up.

Shanghai base metals were mostly lower on Tuesday morning as investors awaited the release of China's trade data for June. Meanwhile, their counterparts on the LME also fell for the most part.