Report Period: June 17–24, 2026
Cover: South Korea | Japan
This week, two structural milestones that the Northeast Asian steel market has been anticipating for months finally arrived on the same day. On June 17, POSCO completed South Korea’s largest electric arc furnace — a 2.5 million tonne‑per‑year facility that will permanently alter the region’s scrap and billet flows. Six days later, on June 23, Korea’s Ministry of Economy and Finance formally enacted the final five‑year anti‑dumping duties on hot‑rolled coil from Japan and China, locking in the trade architecture that will govern flat steel imports for the next half‑decade. For procurement managers, these twin events demand an immediate recalibration of supplier qualification, raw material sourcing, and landed‑cost budgeting. For export sales managers, they redraw the map of who can sell what into Northeast Asia — and who is now permanently excluded.
This report covers the full week of June 17–24, 2026, with explicit week‑on‑week comparisons against June 10–17. It provides complete price tables for all eight core steel products — billet, rebar, HRC, CRC, HDG, carbon steel pipe, stainless steel, and CRGO — across the Chinese FOB, Korean domestic, and Japanese domestic benchmarks, with import parity estimates. Every number is compared against the prior week, so you can see exactly which products are still softening, which have stabilised, and where the cost structure is shifting.
The deep dive analysis dissects the seven forces that drove the market this week: the continued gentle decline in Chinese HRC and billet export prices, the formal enactment of Korea’s permanent anti‑dumping framework, the completion of POSCO’s landmark electric arc furnace, the resumption of Iranian semi‑finished exports, the slow but incomplete recovery of Busan port, the broadening of Japanese mill price hikes beyond Tokyo Steel, and the sharp drop in iron ore below the $100/t threshold. Each dimension is weighted so procurement and sales managers can immediately identify which factors deserve the most attention in their decision‑making.
For procurement managers, the report answers the operational questions that now require urgent action. How do you verify whether your HRC supplier is on the approved price‑undertaking list now that the final duties are permanent law? If your coated steel supply chain relied on Chinese GI, GL, or ZAM, which duty‑free EG and GA alternatives are available and from which mills? With Iranian billet returning to Asian markets and iron ore costs falling, is now the moment to lock in semi‑finished purchases or to wait for further price erosion? And how much additional lead time must you build into your Busan‑routed shipments when dwell times have quadrupled to 11–14 days?
For export sales managers, the report maps the competitive landscape that the new trade architecture has created. Only nine exporters — six Chinese and three Japanese — now have duty‑free access to Korea’s HRC market. Everyone else faces a permanent 28–33% barrier. The report identifies which alternative markets offer the best near‑term opportunities for redirected volumes, how the return of Iranian semi‑finished steel is intensifying competition in the Asian billet and slab trade, and why the broadening of Japanese mill price increases signals that domestic buyers may become more receptive to competitively priced imports even as the AD investigation progresses.
The landed‑cost sensitivity reference tables show exactly how a further move in the won, freight rates, or FOB prices will impact the all‑in cost of HRC and billet imported into Korea. The raw‑material substitution tracker monitors the evolving spread between domestic scrap and imported billet — a spread that POSCO’s new EAF is about to reshape. And the expanded anti‑dumping alternative‑sourcing matrix provides specification‑level detail on which mills can supply which grades under which standards for every product category affected by trade barriers.
No other weekly publication combines this breadth of product coverage, depth of trade policy analysis, and precision of week‑on‑week comparison. Whether you are a procurement manager trying to secure Q3 supply before further currency depreciation, or a sales manager navigating the increasingly complex web of Northeast Asian trade barriers, this report gives you the data and the framework to act.
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