:: Alter Trading Corporation - scrap metal recycler and broker ::

Alter Trading Scrap Metal Recycling News & Press

JUNE 2004 - INTERVIEW: China scrap metal appetite seen recovering in Q3
By Lee Chyen Yee
SHANGHAI, June 21 (Reuters) - The appetite for scrap metal in China, the world's number two consuming country, will gather pace in the third quarter after demand slowed in the past month, a leading scrap industry organization said. But China's imports of copper and aluminium scrap in 2004 are unlikely to rise as quickly as in 2003, as Chinese credit curbs stifle some metal output, representatives from the Bureau of International Recycling (BIR) told Reuters over the weekend.

"My personal view is that demand will pick up as we get into the autumn," Robert Stein, senior vice president of the BIR's non-ferrous division, said by telephone from Beijing. China's voracious appetite for scrap to feed its fast-growing metal production facilities is sucking up world supply and causing a shortfall of raw materials in the rest of the globe, including Europe and the United States, the world's biggest scrap consuming country.

"China still needs metals. It needs raw materials and I think it will take a couple of months perhaps to clear the backlog of containers at the ports," Stein said in an interview.

Stein and BIR's director general, Francis Veys, were in Beijing to meet the Chinese quarantine bureau, which has agreed to extend the deadline by which foreign scrap suppliers must apply for permits to sell to China to September 1 from July 1.

China issued the new licensing rules late last year with the aim of preventing hazardous material from being included in metal scrap shipments -- usually a mix of mangled wire and bits from equipment ranging from computers to pipes, the quarantine bureau said on its Web site www.aqsiq.gov.cn.

May 2004 - Keystone Selects Alter as Sole Scrap Supplier

March 7, 2005 - Alter is please to announce that Robin Cai is joining Alter Trading. Robin is joining Alter to head up its first overseas office in Shanghai, China.