There have been cheerier get-togethers than Tuesday's 11th annual meeting of the steel trade associations of Korea and Japan, held in Tokyo. Delegates were voting no to everything: no to raw material price increases, no to quarterly pricing of iron ore (rather than annual), and no to the proposed production joint venture between Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton.
Steelmakers are at last waking up to a convergence of forces, none of them desirable. So far, they have successfully passed on the rising cost of spot ore, which has doubled since early September, thanks to strong demand for steel from manufacturers of autos and home appliances. Korea's Posco, the world's fourth-largest steelmaker, posted a more than fourfold jump in first-quarter profit on Tuesday. On Citigroup calculations, gross margins in March at Baosteel, the bellwether of China's steel industry, were not far from the glory days of April and May 2008.
Yet prospects for further margin enhancement seem slim. Already-high steel prices leave little scope for further hikes; destocking has already started among traders. Input prices, meanwhile, may be inflated by the tight supply of ore. On Barclays Capital estimates, the big three producers will deliver less than 55m tonnes of additional production from new projects this year and next, in a seaborne iron ore market approaching 1bn tonnes. China, meanwhile, where nearly 70 per cent of the seaborne market is spot, will have to keep shipping it in, if only to offset the declining quality of its domestic ore.