DAILY: Chinese coke producers announce markup plans, wrangles loom

The coordinated price hikes announced by Chinese coke producers on May 18 signal the official start of their new price wrangle with steelmakers in the days ahead. Weakening steel prices and the prospect of peaking hot metal output are expected to keep steel mills firmly resistant to higher raw material costs, though.

Mysteel assessed the national quasi-first-grade met coke prices at Yuan 1,677.4/tonne ($246.6/t) for dry-quenched type and Yuan 1,526/t for wet-quenched, including VAT, on Monday, both unchanged from the last session. Mysteel learned that major coke producers in North China's Shanxi, Hebei and Inner Mongolia and East China's Shandong announced on