Carbofer General Trading, a private company established in Luxembourg in 2004, specializes in the global trading of steel and raw materials. In 2008, its trading volumes reached 9.7 million mt and its revenues reached $2.7 billion. The company’s global network consists of sales offices located in Europe, CIS, Middle East, Asia and America.

It is impossible to say whether or not the steel industry gained some ground during the summer period. A while back, there was greater coherence as regards the overall situation of market players. Either everybody was doing well, or everybody was doing badly. Nowadays, the general state of affairs is more contradictory, which makes it difficult to gain a clear picture.

For example, at the beginning of August in China some really good days were seen; however, in the space of just three days, the scenario changed dramatically and Chinese players are now going through a very bad period and nobody can predict if China will be able to return to its previous levels any time soon. The steel markets are very unpredictable, now more than ever.

Taking a look at the billet markets, we can say that the situation has been quite good and that the predictions of a price downtrend were mistaken. Why? The answer is in the most natural economic concept: the balance between offers and demand. And since the second has been stronger that the first, prices have kept their strength. Other than this, billet producers have benefited from the demand coming from Asia.

Meanwhile, we see that rerollers are in a difficult situation, squeezed between the strength of billet prices and the weakness of the finish product markets. This is especially the case in Europe, more than in Asia.

In the US there have not been so many difficulties in the longs market during the last few months, though transaction volumes are very low.

Russia’s longs sales performance is down around 60 percent, mostly due to the bad situation in the construction industry.

North Africa and the Middle East have seen a good period in recent months, which helped solve some problems of certain countries (Italy, for example) that were experiencing difficulties in their local markets and were able to compensate by exporting some tonnages. During the last couple of weeks, there has been a reduction in the strength of these markets, but it is not easy to understand how much it was linked to Ramadan and how much has been due to signals of weakness from China.

As regards the future for the European longs market, we may say that the current situation is not an easy one and that something will have to change. Market players will be required to show maximum caution.