How have steel prices changed in the recent days in India? It is indeed a very difficult question to handle by any researcher. There is no dearth of organisations collecting and disseminating market intelligence, including hard price data. However, there are wide variations among the numbers they come out with. How do they collect this information in most cases is a mystery and how reliable they can be is speculative. Yet, the government takes major decisions on the basis of such questionable data with the obvious risk of going awfully wrong.
The government forced the major steel companies to publish price statistics on newspapers or websites. At least some of them seem to have done it. Everyone should make it a point to try to dig out the same and assess them for their usefulness. They are certainly misleading and mostly incomplete. It is clear that the steel makers do not want to let the world know at what prices they are selling their products. I can appreciate some commercial sensitivity involved in that. But, let’s look at China and what they do. You need not even pay for very detailed price information, much more than what you would look for ordinarily, from many sources. If you are ready to pay a little, you get almost everything you would be looking for, and needless to mention, they are extremely reliable and accurate.
Coming to production statistics, there is only one organisation that collects data from the production returns submitted to them on a monthly basis. I am not unaware of the difficulties in getting regular and correct information from hundreds of small units scattered all around the country, many of whom may decide not to part with the correct statistics, for reasons one is familiar with. But, what about the information from the large steel companies? Detailed producer-wise information related to each steel product that is produced is not available, except for SAIL, Tata Steel, and RINL. The information provided in the annual reports of the companies are insufficient and are useless from a researcher or policy maker’s point of view. There are huge shortcomings in the data available even for the named companies.
In comparison, again, you will not be breaking your head, to find production details by sizes and shapes, including grades if applicable, for each product type, for almost all large producers in China. You may even get information such as how much each company has exported or imported and at what prices.
By Indian law, you are not even allowed to publish the names of importers and exporters in any public document, even if the agencies collect the information directly from the ports through approved and legal channels.
Transparency is certainly missing in the steel industry when it comes to disseminating information. This may be the same or worse in the case of other industries too.
Why is it so? The industry may have taken the commercial sensitivities attached to such information to ridiculous levels. At the end of the day, significant volumes of information, which are not thrown up into the public domain are in fact available with various researchers. The companies seem to have also followed a preferential system with selective dissemination. With this, many researchers have direct and free access to critical information. Thus, the industry approach has made things difficult for the government only.
Let the Indian steel industry learn a few things from their Chinese counterparts. Imagine Vodafone or Airtel maintaining their various plans as closely guarded secrets!
The author is independent strategy consultant, Steel and Natural Resources
