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Your bar stock is imported now: three things to change
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#steel billets#imported steel price#machine shop#reshaped-v3

Your bar stock is imported now: three things to change

Uzair bin Haroon

The round bar on your rack this quarter almost certainly landed in a container rather than coming off a local rolling mill, and that changes three things at the machine: ask for the mill certificate with the quote instead of with the delivery, check hardness on the first bar out of every bundle, and buy the stock for jobs you have already won rather than waiting for the order. The reason sits in two lines of July's production table.

Billet is the 130 mm square bar that gets rolled into the round stock you chuck in a lathe. Pakistan's melt shops made 200,000 tonnes of it in July against 295,000 a year earlier — a third less — while the assembly lines that eat the same steel built 16,363 cars and 1,203 trucks, up 66 and 94 per cent on the year. Something had to fill that gap, and the import table says what: 518,392 tonnes of iron and steel landed in July at $604 a tonne, and 287,128 tonnes in August at $631.

Ask for the certificate at quotation

Bar from a local induction furnace comes with a mill certificate you can argue about over the phone, because the furnace is an hour away and wants the next order. Imported bar comes with a certificate that travelled in the container, and nothing at the stockist's counter forces the heat number on that paper to match the bundle they cut from. If the job is an axle bracket for a truck line running at double last year's rate, the customer's inspector will ask for the certificate and will read the heat number off it.

So make it a line in the enquiry, not a request at delivery: mill certificate with heat number, supplied at quotation, and no bundle accepted without one. A stockist who cannot produce it before you commit will not produce it after.

Check hardness on the first bar of every bundle

Steel landing at $604 to $631 a tonne is commodity stock, not free-cutting stock, and it varies from bundle to bundle in a way a single mill's output does not. Set the job up for the softer end of the range you have measured, check hardness on the first bar out of each bundle before it goes into production, and budget inserts on what the last lot actually ate rather than on the supplier's data sheet. The night shift cannot renegotiate a feed rate that was set on an optimistic assumption; it can only scrap parts.

Buy October's bar at September's price

This next part is a view, not a published number. Domestic billet is down a third on the year. Imported tonnage fell 45 per cent between July and August while the landed price rose $27 a tonne over the same month. Demand from the shops that buy the steel is running the other way: the fabricated metal index was 13.6 per cent above last July. Less steel arriving, more vehicles being built, and a price already moving: the three point the same way.

The practical form of that view is narrow, so treat it narrowly. For jobs you have already won with October delivery, buy the bar now at a price you can see. For work you are still quoting, price the material at the current landed cost plus a margin you are willing to defend, and put a validity date on the quote. If the August index shows billet output back above 250,000 tonnes, the furnaces have restarted and none of this holds.

And when a job needs bar you cannot source in time or a part you cannot fit into this month's schedule, Vesprr's machine shop quotes from your drawing.

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