Large
investments made by market players
Bangladesh will fully depend on
locally manufactured billets within two years as large investments have been
made by some market players, said steel mill owners.
Billets, metal bars in
semi-finished state, are the main raw materials for manufacturing steel
products for the construction industry. Leading companies which produce them,
import these metal bars to fill the gap in demand.
Due to high demand for quality
billets the market players themselves have invested money to produce this steel
product in the country, sources said.
Currently the ship breaking
industry cannot meet the whole demand from the steel and re-rolling mills for
scrap iron, from which billets are being manufactured.
Chairman of Bangladesh Steel
Re-rolling Mills (BSRM) Ali Hussain Akberali said, "I do not get enough
iron scrap locally as per my demand to manufacture billets."
Leading companies do not
manufacture steel products directly from iron scraps, he said adding, "I
myself do not get quality scraps for manufacturing billets at my factory. I can
only get 30 per cent of my requirement."
"To meet the growing demand
for steel products I need billets and it is met from my own factory. I also
have to import some quantity," he said.
Mr Akberali said a good number of
mills which were once just re-rolling mills are now manufacturing billets and
when the companies currently in the pipeline start production, billets import
will stop automatically.
A source in the ship-breaking
industry said iron scraps currently available are not enough to feed the billet
manufacturing units but if scraps are available locally, we'll be able to save
a huge amount of foreign currency.
He said as the trend of
manufacturing quality steel products are there in the market, so producers of
low quality steel would be discouraged in the coming days.
He said steel products
manufactured from locally available iron scraps are not in any way of inferior
quality than the imported billets. Rather it is better as we devote our
attention to quality.
Bangladesh can have its own iron
scraps from the ship breaking industry if high technology is used in the
breaking yards, a Bangladesh Ship-breaking Industry Association office bearer
said.
He said if local ship breaking
industry fails to supply quality iron scraps to the billet manufactures, import
of shirred scraps which is currently being imported by some leading companies
would increase.
To meet the demands for iron
scraps locally the ship-breakers are thinking to adopt new technology in their
yards to convert iron scraps into shirred scraps, he said.
Source:
the financial express. 15 October 2013
No comments:
Post a Comment