Chinese Steel Pipe Market Seems to Pick up Slightly, Analyst

After the entry of Mar, Chinese steel pipe market presented new improvements, along with the increasing domestic steel prices. Most Chinese pipe manufacturers maintain optimistic towards the future market, holding that the prices may go up amid stabilization. However, the export of steel pipe was still in face of large pressure.

Recently, domestic pipe market continuously showed signs of increasing. During Mid-Feb, prices for 20# seamless steel pipe were coming at 4,900-5,150 yuan/ton in Shanghai, Nanjing, Shenyang and Chengdu areas, up by 100 yuan/ton, and that of 20# 108mm*4.5mm structure seamless steel pipe at 4,850 yuan/ton and 4,800 yuan/ton respectively in Tianjin and Beijing.

Meanwhile, the same trend also performed in the sector of welded pipe market. This weekend, prices for scaffold in Shanghai market arrived at 4,350 yuan/ton, an accumulative increase of 150 yuan/ton. And the averaged price hike in Hangzhou, Nanjing, Beijing, Tianjin, Tangshan, Guangzhou, Wuhan, Shenyang, Chengdu and Harbin etc reached 150-200 yuan/ton, or even 250-280 yuan/ton or more higher in other places.

It's learned that the market transactions turned better in recent period, with full contract orders.
And the main driver behind the overall price rise is the increasing raw materials, which pushed the production costs to pick up, leading steel mills to lift the ex-works prices. In East. China, ex-factory prices of pipe billet were up by 100-200 yuan/ton, with flourish market demand.

Nevertheless, China's export of steel pipe was still falling. As per the surveyed statistics, China has totally exported 0.52mt of steel pipes in Jan, an m-o-m decrease of 31,100 tons, and that of seamless steel pipe at 0.26mt, down by 9.43% from one month before or a y-o-y decline of 23.12%.

Meanwhile, China's major export destination of seamless steel pipe focused on Kuwait, India, US, Korea and Iran etc, with the largest export volume of 28,300 tons in Kuwait, accounting for 10.86% of the total; 26,400 tons to India, occupying for 10.12%; 23,900 tons US, 9.19%; 17,600 tons Korea, 6.76%;14,030 tons Iran, 5.38%.

In the passed one year, China's full-year export of welded steel pipe was at 2.53mt, a y-o-y decline of 33.48%. And the figures in Jan this year came at 0.2mt, down by 107,500 tons from the same period of last year. Global demand for welded pipe continued a downturn, given to the slowly-recovered world economy and double-anti cases mainly proposed by European and US countries.

The market insiders believed that Chinese steel exports would be expected to turn better in the later period on resuming market demand. At present, some mills in Europe and US constantly lifted their ex-works prices impacted by the increasing scrap prices, also the steel export prices showed notable signs of rising in Russian and other CIS countries, resulting from the improved market demand in Mid-east and Southeast regions and areas. In Mar, HRC export price in CIS and Turkey has climbed up to US$ 560-575/ton (FOB).

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