Stainless Steel

摘要

It is clear that the supercharged end to 2003 and beginning of 2004 for stainless melted production has slowed. Five consecutive months of double-digit growth in global output to January 2004 has, according to provisional estimates, decelerated to less than a 2 percent increase in March. Chief culprit has to be China, where the required inventory adjustment for stainless finished products is taking somewhat longer than first anticipated. This is hitting the market two-fold. Firstly, domestic Chinese melted production and finished product output is being trimmed. Although state-owned melted production was up 35 percent year-on-year in the first three months of 2004, due to increased output from Taiyuan, official figures indicate a month-on-month decline in March. Moreover, Taiyuan along with the two frontline stainless rerollers in China, Ningbo Baoxin and Zhangjiagang Posco Stainless Steel Co. (ZPSS) are all reported to have cut production by around 20 percent during April. The slowdown in Chinese apparent consumption is also hitting imports of semi-finished and finished stainless, which of course directly impacts mills in the rest of the world. Official figures show that imports of cold rolled flat products, for example, declined by 21 percent year-on-year during the first quarter of 2004.