According to, Mr Huang Jingan, Chairman of China Coke Association, was possible to experience a hard adjustment period next year against the backgrounds that they had difficulties in export amid the word wide economy woes. He suggested the whole industry maintain operation by shrinking production scales. And enterprises should arrange production according to the real sales volume.
Mr Huang pointed out that demand for coke plummeted under several influence combined and the whole industry was confronted with severe challenge. He said "Actually, it is infrequent to see such huge price decline. And the market is now harassed by capital problem, resulting from the greatly dropping sales price."
He told the reporter that coke demand has declined sharply since this July. At the same time, export was also affected. Price for coke had remained a sliding trend for 3 consecutive months while the coking coal price was firm during the period. Therefore, coke enterprises suffered from great losses.
Mr Huang said that "International market price kept weak in October. Steel makers all over the world will continue to cut their productions. Last week, American steel makers' capacity utilization ratio reached the lowest level during the recent four year. Besides, Japanese steel makers also started planning production cutback. Thus, it is forecasted that global crude steel outputs will keep a sliding trend."
He said that "The price decline is abnormal. And coke price has been lower than the price for coking coal, Prices for some breeds even slashed by over CNY 2000 per tonnes."
According to the latest statistics from WSA, 66 main steel production countries and regions totally produced 108.4 million tonnes of crude steel in September down by 3.2% YOY and 3.7% MoM. This has been the first decline since February 2002. Influence by the bleak steel market, domestic coke enterprises have to limit productions. He also suggested that coke enterprises pay high attention on obsolete capacity elimination.
According to the statistics, coke outputs dropped by 9.9% YoY in September. In the mean time, the apparent consumption of coke also declined by 11.47% YoY.
