Tokyo’s Steel Plate Price to be Weakening

The steel plate market in the Tokyo area, Eastern Japan, is weakening at 80,000 yen per tonne (center value) for 19 millimeters thick/5×10 of the cut length. There seems to be little room of its declining. But there seems to be less bullish among distributors since there is easing of the demand mainly for construction. The volume of sales of raw materials of steel plates and the cutlength products tended to decrease in January and February. According to research done in January by Tokyo Steel Product Dealers Association, the volume of total sales of steel plates and intermediate plates decreased 6.0% from the previous month mainly due to decrease of sales of the cutlength products. Some of the distributors forecast that there will be recovery from the current market situations after April-June while the others like a meltdown trader forecast the market in March will be much worse. Steel plate supply by domestic blast furnace steel makers is abundant mainly for the all-purpose products, and the distributors pay attention to how to perform the price maintenance.