The same is steel, how is the gap opened?
By mid-April, there was an obvious differentiation curve inside the steel plate.
According to the latest statistics of china galaxy Securities, the plate plate has increased by 2.33% this year, while the pipe plate has increased by 1.20%, while the special steel plate has slightly decreased by 0.12%.
The number is not big, but the direction is very telling.
Automobile exports prop up plates, and pipes follow the infrastructure.
The most direct driving force for the rise of plates is the car.
According to the data released by China Automobile Association on April 10th, the automobile export in the first quarter was 2.226 million, a year-on-year increase of 56.7%. Among them, 954,000 new energy vehicles were exported, an increase of more than 120%. Every car is inseparable from cold-rolled sheet and galvanized sheet. The more cars are sold outside, the more solid the demand for plates will be. The logic of pipes is similar-infrastructure. Statistics from the National Bureau of Statistics show that infrastructure investment increased by 11.4% in January and February this year. Underground pipe network, water conservancy projects and urban renewal are all eating pipes.
What happened to special steel? Supply exceeds demand, and we haven't found an exit yet
In 2025, the price of special steel continued the downward trend since 2021, and the trend can be summarized as "high start → long negative decline → short-term sharp pull → bottoming out again → low stabilization".
The core problem is one: supply exceeds demand.
The production capacity of building materials is accelerating the transfer to industrial materials. As the core material of high-end manufacturing, special steel has entered a period of high growth. But downstream demand has not kept up. Traditional users of special steel, such as mechanical manufacturing and tool processing, have a slow pace of recovery.
More importantly, the domestic self-sufficiency rate of high-end special steel (such as high-temperature alloy and high-end bearing steel) is not enough, and low-end products are caught in homogenization price war. It's not flattering at both ends.
Conclusion
The support of plates and pipes will not disappear in the short term. Automobile exports are still at a high level, and infrastructure projects are landing one after another. As long as these two directions are not turned off, the demand will still be there.
On the special steel side, the short-term pressure is not small. But in the long run, the logic of high-end and import substitution is established. The Tenth Five-Year Plan clearly proposes to break through the core varieties such as high-end bearing steel and high-temperature alloy, and the self-sufficiency rate is set at over 95%. The problem is that no one can say how long this "long-term" is.
Differentiation will continue. At least in the first half of this year, the leading position of plates and pipes will not be shaken with great probability.
