The COVID-19 outbreak disrupted our daily life and work, which caused the global economy and people's lives and property huge losses. Under the strong leadership of Chinese government, China has achieved a staged victory to fight against the epidemic, the business work restart orderly. However, the spread of COVID-19 in other countries brought a great uncertainty to China and global economy.

    For the metallurgy industry, Chinese domestic steel inventories reached to 34.3 million tons with the high record under the impact of corona virus, the steel demand got soft and weak after the downstream industry halts and cuts. China launched major infrastructure projects and series of policies to support the Small and Medium Enterprises and promote the growth and recovery of import and export trade business since March. But the outbreak of overseas epidemics in March gradually revealed the impact of import and export trade business. Now China with a long term depending on imported iron ore, manganese ore and chrome ore has encountered the impact of the epidemic situation which main exporting countries outbreak. The metallurgical industry supply chain face the potential risks and challenges.

  South Africa as the important manganese ore and chrome ore exported country to China, South Africa exported the volume of 13.426 million tons of manganese ore and 12.556 million tons of chromium ore in 2019, which accounts for 39.27% and 78.97% of the total imported of China. In Jan-Feb 2020, Chinese manganese ore and chrome ore imported from South Africa increased by 40.2% and 86.66% to 1.796 million tons and 2.148 million tons. South Africa announced that the 21 days lockdown which influenced the delivery time of April and impacted the Chinese domestic manganese and chrome spot market quickly.

We,Ferro-Alloys.com is planing to organize the online international conference 'Impact of COVID-19 to the Metallurgical Supply Chain and world Steel Industry '. We sincerely invite all insiders to attend free.