A steel user, however big or small, is always concerned about steel buying as it is normally a big ticket item. In addition, as steel trade is not the prime knowledge domain for the user and as such they are busy with their own operations, their market knowledge is somewhat limited. In most of the cases, the team buying steel is also responsible for purchasing large number of items, thus they rely on a segment of their own supply chain for market feedback. In other words, although steel purchase is a big ticket item, they do not have a bench mark to compare their transaction prices, which in a big way decided their bottom line. Lastly, steel has been very volatile in last 6 months and has effected many users in a very severe way making it all the more important to track the prices and trends.
www.steelprices-middleeast.com is a new portal that provides domestic pricing information for benchmark steel products in each category at select location in Middle East on a regular basis 5 days a week. In addition, FOB levels for commonly exported steel products from two of the major exporting nation Ukraine & Russia and China are also available on daily basis to give a sense of alternates. This would assist persons, including steel makers, traders, users and others, who are connected with industry in some way to asses the steel pricing trends and utilize in their day to day working to take considered decisions.
Benchmark products at select locations cover the entire basket of garden variety of steel products including input material for steel making and processing. The products covered are
1. Scrap 80:20 HMS 2. Billets 125x125 3sp/ps 3. Rebar 8-25 BS 4449 Grade 460 B 4. WRC 5.5 SAE 1008 5. IPE Medium S235 JR / SS 400 6. IPE AA Medium S235 JR / S275 JR 7. W Beams Medium S275 JR 8. HEA Medium S275 JR 9. HEB Medium S275 JR 10. Structural Light S235 JR / SS 400 11. HRC 2.3x1250 S235 JR / SS 400 12. HRS 4-20xuptox1500XL A 36 13. HRS 6-20x2x6 A 36 14. Plates 8-40x2x6 S275 JR 15. CRC 0.7x1000 Commercial 16. HDG 0.7x1000 A 653 / G 3302 120gms 17. PPGI 0.5x1000 25/14 Mu
Mr N Sharma of SteelGuru.com said that “We have been receiving requests from Steel Trade Today subscribers for domestic steel prices during the last 3 years of SteelGuru’s operations. The volatility in the steel market in last 6 months to 8 months also propelled us to put it up quickly.”
He said that “The feedback from our readers during testing phase has been very positive and encouraging and we plan to enlarge the product location mix gradually to include more products and locations. The feedback received during the testing phase has helped us fine tune the features and functions of the website to a great extant to suit the requirements of steel users, in particular.” Mr Sharma added that similar services are being launched for other emerging market like India as well as mother of all markets China.
The prices are displayed on daily, weekly and monthly basis. Steelprices-middleeast.com also has search facilities to access old data from the archives. Graphical representation of trends and comparison of price movement 2 or more products is also available. A calculator to convert domestic prices into comparative CNF and vice versa is also provided, which takes into account all duties and expenses. In addition, you can monitor currency exchange rates, metal prices, BDI for the day as well as access archives for past data. Other features include converters for weight, length etc, glossary and advanced search functions. The benchmark product price information is supplemented by global pricing news. All these features are accessible only to registered user who is provided with a login id and password after payment is received. To know more about the service, please logon to the www.steelprices-middleeast.com or send a mail to info@steelprices-middleeast.com
www.steelprices-middleeast.com is developed and run by none other that www.steelguru.com, which has become the largest English based steel portal in the world, with more than 1 million page hits per month in just 3 years of operations. It compiles and publishes more than 100 articles every day on the website and also sends out free email based news latter called Steel Trade Today to more that 35,000 subscribers spread across 138 countries. STT is available in 7 flavors including International, Raw Material & Mining, Indian, Chinese, Middle East, Russian and Stainless & Special Steel editions.
