Time and again over the past 20 years, and usually irrespective of the trend in underlying steel demand, the HRB export price has changed direction about every six to 10 months. Since 2000, the HRB export price trend has reversed about 21 times, for an average duration of 10 months. Interestingly, since the HRB export price declined from the summer of 2018 until late 2018; hence, if by May 2019 there’s no improvement, this would be a duration of about 11 months.
Products for which prices are highly volatile include prime scrap, obsolete scrap, iron ore, coking coal, metallurgical coal and commodity grade steel products.
Hence, given the regularity of swings in price direction, this is one of the reasons in January 2019 that we were forecasting a sizable rise in the HRB export price by about May 2019.
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