Stainless steel at all-time high; here’s why

Stainless steel prices are at an all-time high on Thursday. It saw nearly 7 percent gain and today, we started the day with nearly 2 percent on the higher side.

The latest trigger comes in from talks in China that there could be output curbs now for nickel, pig iron as well. Now, that is an important raw material for steel and we have seen the steel prices run up because of that.

There are lower inventories, supplies that are being curbed in China and the downstream demand for steel of all varieties has been quite resilient, and that has been keeping the steel prices higher.

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On the output itself, the steel prices have been taking cues from that. For the month of August, we have seen the China crude steel production decline by nearly 4 percent. Now, this is the lowest since March 2020 and when you look at August of last year, the steel production was at 94.8 million tonnes. This time around, August production has been 83.4 million tonnes, so nearly 9 million tonnes of a decline on a year-on-year (YoY) basis as well.

This is the reason why you have seen various steel varieties do quite well. So, it has been steel rebar, which is up 22 percent; this year, the HRC steel is 30 percent on the higher side. The steel futures clearly seem to be doing quite well at 36 percent on the higher side and the markets do believe that the last quarter of this year could be looking at lower steel production so the steel prices are going to remain in favour.

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