My Steel Feature: China raw material supplies up, and steel?

Heavy-duty trucking needs more time back to full mode

When steelmaking raw materials transportation by water and by rail has been steadily and gradually recovering to their normal levels since early February especially in the past two weeks, iron ore transhipment from sea ports to the ports along the Yangtze River had been running as per normal now, a Shanghai-based industrial source said.

Trucking especially inter-province transportation, however, has remained an issue, as road transportation has been hit more severely by epidemic, which many highways blocked all the way until the past week or so.

To encourage more heavy-duty trucks back on road, China’s Ministry of Transportation has removed tolling fees on all the highways since February 17, requesting the provincial and regional authorities to remove the road blocks.

Some Chinese steel mills may feel the inconvenience less keenly due to their heavy reliance on rail or different locations, Mysteel Global noted.

“Most of our iron ore and coal are sent to our plant by rail, so our blast furnaces have not been seriously affected by lack of trucks,” an official from a Shanxi-based steel plant shared, though, their ferroalloys supplies, most by truck, had been disrupted and not much improvement had been detected yet, according to him.

An iron ore procurement official from a steel mill in Hebei of North China shared, though, that, their iron ore trucking “has returned to normal recently especially when many highways have reopened for traffic with no charges”…Full Story