Daily Market Note — 2026-08-08

Market commentary on the global ferrous scrap trade. Not trading advice.

The read

Saturday, so there is no fresh exchange session and no new deep-sea cargo. What there is instead is a useful piece of housekeeping: the Turkish forward curve, absent from most commentary yesterday, is back — and it settles an argument that has been running in this market for two weeks.

Intraday ferrous data for Friday showed the August 2026 Turkish scrap contract bid at $370 and offered at $375, with September bid $373 and offered at $379.50. Read the second number carefully. The September offer is the highest price anywhere in the strip, and it is still below $380. For a fortnight sellers have been justifying increases with a round “Turkey is $380-plus.” On the exchange’s own two-sided market, nobody is offering the second month at $380, let alone transacting there.

The August bid at exactly $370 deserves the same care in the other direction. A bid touching a level is not a close below it, and the spread to the offer is a full $5. It is worth watching rather than acting on.

Key moves

Turkey remains firm but range-bound. Physical references sit in the high $360s to mid $370s a tonne CFR depending on origin and grade — North European material at the lower end, US-origin at the upper, with the premium between the two holding at roughly $7.50. Every published Turkish assessment was unchanged again, extending a freeze that is now among the longest in recent memory. Nothing yesterday reset the market.

Pakistan cooled after its rally, and the direction is the story. Trade reporting put ex-UK shredded into Port Qasim in a $410–415 a tonne CFR range during the week, with a transaction confirmed toward the upper end, and the weekly reference cut by about $5 a tonne. The reason given was not cost but expectation: participants anticipating a further correction if geopolitical tensions ease. That matters more than the $5 itself, because it is an objection no freight quotation answers. Mills were nonetheless reported still covering September and October requirements, selectively — so this is a market waiting on price, not one that has stopped buying.

Pakistani rebar producers moved the other way. Two mills raised grade 60 rebar by PKR 7,000 a tonne (about $25) with immediate effect, with local expectations that the increase goes market-wide, while another producer held around PKR 246,000 a tonne delivered. This is worth separating from any demand narrative: the reporting itself frames these as producers passing on costs accumulated over recent weeks to protect margins, rather than a demand-driven recovery.

That distinction bears on the FBR electricity-linked sales-tax mechanism covered here yesterday — 31 registered melters, re-rollers and composite units placed under collection of five rupees per unit of electricity consumed, retroactive to 1 July. A common reading has been that the charge forces mills to resist scrap increases. The rebar announcements complicate it: producers demonstrating pricing power are not obviously producers being squeezed. Note also that refunds are available monthly through the tax authority’s automated system to digitally integrated taxpayers, which makes the measure a working-capital event rather than a straightforward new cost.

Pakistan’s June scrap imports of 323,896 tonnes remain the last official figure, sharply higher year on year.

Freight and shipping

Hormuz remains impaired, and the proposed fix has changed character. Reported transit-fee proposals — Iran at roughly 5–7% of cargo value, Oman around 3%, the United States insisting on toll-free passage — are now described as a legal and insurance problem rather than a pricing one. Sanctions may make such a payment unlawful, and marine cover can terminate if a prohibited fee is paid. That is a meaningfully worse situation than an expensive toll: a cost can be quoted and passed through, whereas a payment that is prohibited cannot, and the failure modes — a carrier declining transit, an insurer withdrawing, a bank refusing the transaction — never appear as a line on a freight invoice.

No fresh vessel counts were published; the most recent figures remain those reported earlier in the week. Brent held above $83 a barrel, with the market pricing reopening risk higher even as the diplomatic headlines read as progress.

Published carrier measures in force on relevant trades:

• MSC — $500 per container congestion surcharge, Northern Europe to the Indian Subcontinent, until further notice.
• CMA CGM — Emergency Fuel Surcharge from 1 August: $150/TEU on long-haul headhaul dry cargo, $75/TEU on backhaul and intra-regional dry.
• Hapag-Lloyd — outbound tariffs from Karachi and Port Qasim to North Europe raised by $1,500 per container from 1 August. Note the direction: this is the backhaul leg, and it is not a cost on northbound-origin cargo moving toward Pakistan. Bunker, security, terminal and contingency charges may apply separately. The North Europe inland fuel component is scheduled to expire 14 August; inland relief is not ocean relief.
• ONE — Persian Gulf emergency surcharge continues.

At 25–27 tonnes to a box, $500 is roughly $18.50–$20.00 a tonne and $150 about $5.50–$6.00 — for many scrap trades, larger than the margin.

Supplier markets

No verified live dock buying sheets were published for the United Kingdom, the US East Coast, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium or the Baltics. Freight is now doing visible work on the demand side as well as the cost side: Malaysian-origin PNS and shredded were reported available into Pakistan but with high freight explicitly limiting buying interest — one of the clearer instances this year of shipping cost, rather than scrap price, deciding whether an origin clears.

India remains the weaker of the two South Asian destinations, with improving project order books late in July but spot procurement still need-based and cheap domestic sponge iron capping imported scrap demand. Bangladesh stays cautious. In ship recycling, no fresh weekly demolition table was published; the standing picture is firm prices against historically thin arrivals, which means less substitute material actually reaching mills than the price level implies.

Non-ferrous snapshot

Copper $14,092/t (−$168), aluminium $3,280/t (+$20), zinc $3,732/t (−$65) on the LME.

Copper took its largest single-session fall in this run, off Thursday’s high, though it remains comfortably above $14,000 and up over 2% on the week. The structural supports are unchanged — tight non-US inventory, low Chinese exchange stocks, strong import premiums, concentrated US warehouse holdings, deeply negative concentrate treatment charges, and grid and data-centre demand.

The more interesting move was underneath it. Aluminium set a fresh high and was the best-performing metal of the week, up about 3.2%, ahead of zinc at 2.8% and copper at 2.1%. Aluminium is routinely described as the looser of the two majors; on this week’s tape it was not. Anyone valuing mixed aluminium grades off a stale reference is likely working several sessions behind the market.

Glossary

• CFR — Cost and Freight: the seller covers goods and shipping to the destination port.
• HMS 1&2 80:20 — Heavy Melting Scrap, a standard blend of 80% HMS 1 to 20% HMS 2.
• PNS — Plate and Structural scrap, a heavier, cleaner grade than HMS.
• Headhaul / backhaul — the heavier and lighter directions of a trade lane; headhaul normally carries the higher rate.
• TEU — Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit, the standard container measure.
• Sponge iron / DRI — Direct Reduced Iron, an alternative metallic feed competing with scrap.
• Bid / offer — the price a buyer will pay and the price a seller will accept; the gap between them is the spread.