Construction steel prices fall further

The Viet Duc Steel Company said it has lowered prices of steel bars and coils by VND300,000 per ton from July 1, while the Thai Nguyen Iron & Steel Joint Stock Corporation reduced the prices of steel coils by VND300,000 to around VND16.7 million per ton.

The prices of a ton of steel coils produced by the Hoa Phat Group and the Vietnam-Italy Steel Joint Stock Company are VND300,000-600,000 lower than in June.

The decline in prices of construction steel in the Vietnamese market over the past few weeks has been attributed to lower prices of steel billets in the world market.

The most-traded steel rebar on the Shanghai Futures Exchange, for October delivery, closed down 2.9 percent at 5,014 yuan ($774.60) a ton, according to Reuters.

Another contributing factor is weaker demand for construction materials in some localities that have already entered rainy season.

However, many construction contractors said the prices of domestic steel products were still high, cutting deep into their profit, leaving them with smaller profits. Steel costs account for 10-30 percent of a construction project.

Vietnam produced nearly 12 million tons of steel products of different kinds in the first five months of this year, a year-on-year rise of more than 38 percent, while exporting nearly 2.8 million tons, up 80 percent.

The country exported 1.1 million tons of steel to China in the five-month period, twice that of last year, according to the General Department of Vietnam Customs.