European steel market players may have to prepare for more extreme fluctuations of supply and prices in the future, panellists concurred at the Kallanish European Steel Markets conference in Amsterdam on Wednesday.

“The new normal will be higher volatility, not only for raw materials,” said Kallanish southern Europe editor Emanuele Norsa. After two extreme peaks, during Covid-19 and following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, prices have not at all stabilised, with a low registered late last year, an attempted resurgence in the first quarter, and another backlash now.

At German distributor Vogel Stahl, “we discussed the volatility quite a lot”, said its managing director Friso de Vries, who noticed that customers are depleting inventories more than they used to. However, he also pointed out that mills have learned to react much quicker to market changes, by implementing radical production cuts as seen last autumn, and restarts as seen this spring.

Norsa recalled the movement seen from autumn to spring, with a pretty defiant effort by mills to bring up prices, which worked temporarily. “If we remember, in November, the mood was quite gloomy; nobody believed that hot rolled coil prices would come back to over €800 [$869],” as they did by February, he commented.

But that was a short spring and come May, prices were in another pronounced downturn, due to stagnating demand and a wave of low-priced imports. Looking ahead, both speakers said they believed in a rebounding market with recovering prices towards the end of the third quarter; other panellists however were not so sure about this.