According to Steel World Review, a weekly assessment published by Shanghai Metals Market (SMM) on 23 October says Iranian billet export offers rose during the week as power and natural-gas shortages disrupted mill operations and constrained export availability. The report points to firmer offers, but does not establish a recovery in end-user demand or a broad increase in completed transactions.
SMM put Iranian billet export offers at $418–430 per tonne FOB, around $10/t higher week on week. It reported a 30,000-tonne November-shipment deal at $418/t FOB Bandar Abbas for the Gulf and a 20,000-tonne order for prime 3SP billet at $424/t FOB. These are market-reported offers and transactions, not an official national export-price series.
The assessment attributes the tighter export supply mainly to energy constraints. It says severe electricity and gas shortages led several mills to cut output, carry out maintenance or reserve billets for their own rolling operations. It does not identify the plants, quantify lost production or establish how much of Iran’s national output was affected. SMM’s market assessment should therefore not be treated as independently verified national production data.
The report also cites overland sales to northern Iraq at $425–430/t FCA border and a deal to Homs, Syria, at $505/t DAP. For sea-borne shipments, SMM put freight on the Oman route at $25–30/t after a merchant-vessel incident in the Gulf on 22 October. Higher freight may widen the gap between sellers’ offers and buyers’ workable prices, although the report does not quantify its effect on completed trade.
SMM further said the free-market rial weakened by about 2.5% during the week, while rial-denominated billet prices on the Iran Mercantile Exchange fell 1.34%. These figures are from SMM’s assessment and have not been independently reconciled with official data. For market participants, the key distinction is whether higher export offers reflect stronger demand or reduced availability. If energy constraints persist, exporters may have less tonnage to offer; if freight remains elevated, the higher offers may still fail to translate into more sales.
