LME nickel stocks fell by 642t from Rotterdam and Antwerp

The total inventory of rebar across social warehouses and steel makers in China stood at 12.04 million mt as of March 31, down 43,400 mt or 0.4% on the week, and down 3.55 million mt or 22.8% from the same period last year.

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.

The total inventory of construction steel across social warehouses and steel makers in China stood at 12.08 million mt as of March 24, up 43,000 mt or 0.4% on the week, and down 3.51 million mt or 22.5% from the same period last lunar year.

This is a roundup of China's metals weekly inventory as of March 18.

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.

The copper inventories in the domestic bonded zones increased 16,200 mt from December 31 to 203,500 mt as of Friday January 7. The inventory rose more quickly.

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

Total zinc inventory across seven Chinese markets stood at 124,200 mt as of December 20, flat from December 17, but down 2,300 mt from December 13.

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%.