With appearance of steel mills keeping flat or lowering purchase price of ferrosilicon for January to February delivery, ferrosilicon producers further lowered their quotations. Some ferrosilicon exporters accordingly brought down their quotations a little. Even so, the export market of Chinese ferrosilicon remained heart-breaking in recent periods.
Through the period of late December of 2013 to early or even mid January of 2014 many European countries, the US, Japan and South Korea were out on their new year holidays, which lessened the activity offerrosilicon transaction in local markets and had great effect on export market of Chinese ferrosilicon. These countries especially Japan and South Korea were the two largest importers of Chinese ferrosilicon whose numbers accounted for over 80% of the export market share of Chinese ferrosilicon. What's more added to the difficulty of exports of Chinese ferrosilicon was the unchanged export duty rate of 25% on ferrosilicon, which forced many Japanese and South Korean ferrosilicon buyers to try to purchase ferrosilicon from other ferrosilicon producing countries or through other means. Thus the ferrosilicon import market share of Japan and South Korea which was taken by China was gradually deprived of. Chinese currency kept rising against US dollar in 2013 and the mean value of Chinese currency rose to 6.1024 against US dollar on December 30, 2013, which was the 41st high in 2013 and indicated increase range climbed to about 3% throughout the year. RMB appreciation kept rising and export market of Chinese ferrosilicon was greatly impacted, too.