Metals and steel sourcing and trading

Metals & Steels is the second of ROXAY Trading’s three commodity categories. It runs from raw material at the front of the chain through to finished steel products at the end of it.

What sits in this category

• Iron and iron ore — raw feed for steelmaking, bought by mills and by traders supplying them.
• Copper — in the forms used by refiners, wire and cable manufacturers and industrial processors.
• Steel products — finished and semi-finished steel for construction, manufacturing and distribution.
• Pickled hot rolled coil — descaled and oiled strip for tube mills, profile producers and cold formers.
• Galvanized steel coil — hot dip zinc coated strip from a hot rolled or cold rolled base.
• Pre-painted steel — coil coated galvanized strip for panel, cladding and roofing producers.
• Pre-painted aluminium — the same coating principle on an aluminium substrate, where corrosion or weight rules steel out.

Beyond these, ROXAY assesses enquiries for other metal and steel items. As with every category here, the list reflects current focus rather than a fixed limit.

One chain, several different buyers

The same category serves buyers who behave very differently.

A steel mill buying iron ore is managing a continuous feed into a furnace that cannot be interrupted cheaply; its priority is consistency of grade and reliability of arrival. A copper processor is working to a much tighter purity specification, where a small deviation changes the value of the cargo. A distributor buying finished steel is working to dimensions, standards and delivery dates set by their own customers downstream.

Flat rolled buyers sit somewhere else again. A roll former or tube mill is not buying a commodity grade so much as a set of tolerances — thickness, width, coating weight, paint system — because the material feeds a line that was set up around those numbers. A deviation that a stockist would accept without comment can stop that line.

Treating these as one requirement is where sourcing usually goes wrong. ROXAY qualifies supply against the specification that actually matters to that buyer — not against a generic category description.

How ROXAY approaches metals enquiries

Specification comes first. Grade, chemical composition, dimensional tolerance and the applicable standard determine which suppliers can genuinely serve an enquiry, and that shortlist is usually much smaller than a broad category search suggests.

From there we structure the commercial terms, agree the inspection and documentation points, and coordinate the delivery sequence against the Incoterm both sides can support. Where independent inspection is warranted by the size or sensitivity of the cargo, it is built into the contract rather than added afterwards.

We do not publish origin countries, suppliers, mills or trade routes.