Asian scrap demand set to rise as Fastmarkets unveils new regional price forecasts

South and Southeast Asia are two regions currently experiencing significant growth in steel production, which is helping drive up demand for raw steel-making materials.

This makes reliable price forecasts an ever more important tool for scrap market participants in the region, and in turn, Fastmarkets has launched several new Asian scrap price forecasts to complement our current suite of scrap price forecasts.

New South Asia scrap forecasts

Fastmarkets has launched Bangladesh and Pakistan import shredded scrap price forecasts and HMS 1&2 (80:20) import prices for Bangladesh to complement our Indian scrap price forecasts.

This comes as South Asia has been growing in importance to the scrap sector and bringing it into competition with traditional leading global importer, Turkey.

Indeed, Indian, Bangladeshi, and Pakistani scrap imports having risen significantly over the past decade and overtaking traditional leading importer Turkey several times in recent years in several months.

Combined imports peaked at 1.9 million tonnes in December 2023. Driving demand for scrap across the region is rising steel production, with steel output in Bangladesh and Pakistan having risen by 37% and 13% over the past five years and expected to grow significantly over the few years.

While much of the capacity increase will be blast furnaced-basic oxygen furnace focused, mills in the region will likely still require scrap volumes in their melt mixes.

Southeast Asian steel output rising, Vietnam scrap price forecast launched

Similarly, Southeast Asian steel production is going through a significant period of growth, with output having risen to 51.96 million tonnes in 2023, up from 9.08 million tonnes in 2013, while Fastmarkets forecasts significantly over the next decade.

Much of the increases in steel production in the region have been led by Chinese investment in the region, and this should drive increases in steel-making raw material demand, such as scrap, alongside iron ore and coking coal.

In turn, Fastmarkets is launching a forecast for the Vietnam HMS 1&2 (80:20) import price after the initial price assessment for Vietnam was launched in 2018.

Machine learning and deep market knowledge as a forecasting tool

Fastmarkets new price forecasts will allow consumers of scrap across Asia to get a view on price dynamics and outlooks of this changing market, giving confidence to market participants as they plan for the future, and the evolving steel industry in the continent.

The new forecasts will be available to subscribe to via the Steel Scrap Research Tracker and the Fastmarkets dashboard.

Fastmarkets’ forecast methodology for these forecasts combines our in-depth knowledge of the Asian scrap sector with machine learning applications to bring insights and build on Fastmarkets’ already highly accurate price forecasts for the continent that cover Indian, Chinese and Taiwanese markets.

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