Aiming at high value-added wire and bar on technical advantage
----Interview with Shen Huimei Head of trading department Hanil Steel Corporation
Founded in 1977, Hanil Steel Corporation has grown as the leader for cold drawn bars in South Korea. Through technical innovation and development in past years, Hanil Steel produced cold drawn bar and wire rod with high quality.
Asian Metal: Hello, Ms.. Shen, please make an introduction of your company.
Ms. Shen: Our company is founded in 1977 and it is the most largest producer for cold drawn bar in South Korea, with an annual production capacity of 120,000 tons. In addition, we are also the manufacturer of wire in South Korea, with an annual production capacity of 50,000t. We can produce and export soft and hard wire, galvanized wire and so on.
Asian Metal: Which steel mills in China did you used to cooperate with? What materials do you need to import?
Ms. Shen: We mainly buy Hot Rolled round bar and wire rod from China. We used to cooperate with Shagang Group, Huaigang Special Steel, Zenith Group, Qingdao Special Steel, Shisteel, Daye Special Steel, Nangang, Laiwu Steel, Ansteel, Baotou Steel, Juneng Special Steel, Beitai Steel and so on.
Asian Metal: Please introduce steel mills which can produce wire rod in South Korea. Compared with them, what is the advantage for materials from China?
Ms. Shen: POSCO and Hyundai Steel can produce wire rod in South Korea. For carbon wire rod, there is no much difference between Chinese materials and South Korean materials. Chinese materials are competitive in prices. However, prices from China kept going up and stood high in recent years after Chinese reduced production capacity for the environmental protection.
Asian Metal: What is your product using wire rod and round bar as raw materials? And what are their applications?
Ms. Shen: We mainly produce Cold Drawn Bar and Wire.
Cold Drawn Bar is a high quality product manufactured under numerous sophisticated processes. Hot-rolled wire rods and round bars, raw materials, undergo a cold drawing process and will be cut at regular intervals. Polishing and correction process are followed in order to enhance surface toughness, dimensional accuracy and straightness. Cold Drawn Bar will be used as automotive parts such as shock absorber shaft, steering shaft; machinery parts such as air-con compressor shaft, ball bearing/race, various motor shaft, printer and copy machine shaft; flanges, bolts, nuts and so forth.
Our wires include wire for bailing wire and spring, spring, galvanized wire for wire mesh and mesh fence, galvanized mild steel wire for cable amouring, galvanized and patented wire for redrawing and so on.
Asian Metal: What are the advantages of your products?
Ms. Shen: We accumulated a lot of experience in past years. Our Jinyong Mill has launched Cold Drawn Bar production line in 2004, equipped with Coil to Bar Drawing Machine and Draw Bench. Our products can meet different customers' requirement on sufficient specifications and attractive prices.
Asian Metal: What is your company's direction and goal in the future?
Ms. Shen: We hope that we can produce more high value-added steel products in the near future by improving our technology, such as bearing steel, alloy steel and high carbon wire rod. There will be a bigger market for these products, where we can show more advantages. In addition, we will improve our market strategy, letting more and more customers satisfied with our products.
Asian Metal: Chinese construction steel prices kept standing high last year. In addition, Chinese steel export volume came down obviously due to the trade war between China and the U.S. Whether this brought some influence to your business?
Ms. Shen: Yes. We mainly import raw materials from China. However, Chinese government carried out policies on cutting steel production capacity recently, supporting prices from China stand high. In addition, discouraged by the trade war between China and the U.S., as well as the economic depression in South Korea, our import volume saw big decline. What's worse, Chinese domestic market became better than export market, so mills paid less attention to exporting business. As we did not have enough chances to buy raw materials in South Korea at good prices, our sales lost some competition to some degrees.
Even though there have been some changes in market at home and abroad, we hope that Chinese steel mills can support their exporting business as always.
