December 03, 2008

Salzgitter sees POSCO coking coal settlement as benchmark

Salzgitter AG said no agreement has yet been reached with suppliers of coking coal after Asian peer POSCO accepted a 200% price increase.

A spokesman of Salzgitter AG said that POSCO’s agreement can be seen as a benchmark for the whole industry but declined to say whether he expects similar price hikes for Salzgitter.

POSCO on Monday said that it has agreed to a more than 200% price increase on some of the coking coal it buys from an unnamed Australian resource company for fiscal 2008.

Meanwhile, Nikkei reported over the weekend that Japan's Nippon Steel Corp is expected to agree to a proposed 200 percent increase in coking coal prices by Anglo Australian resource company BHP Billiton Ltd for fiscal 2008, but did not say where it got the information.