A new producer adds most value by supplying iron units, sections and certified quality

9.1 Screening the segments

Figure 9.1 places each product segment according to two measures: the size of its market in Cameroon, and the extent to which local capacity already covers it. Segments below the line, where local capacity covers less than the market, are open; those above it are saturated.

Source: Cameroon Steel analysis of Ocitram capacity and demand data (May 2026) [S03] and UN Comtrade import tonnages (2023) [S05]. Coverage for sections is indicative and reflects light sections only.

Table 9.1 adds the factors that the chart cannot show: competition, barriers to entry and the direction of demand.

Table 9.1 derivedSegment screen for a new producer in Cameroon

Source: Cameroon Steel analysis based on Chapters 4 to 8 [S05][S03][S20][S13][S22]. DRI: direct-reduced iron. HBI: hot-briquetted iron.

9.2 Iron units first

Iron units are the bottleneck of the Cameroonian industry and of Sub-Saharan Africa more broadly (Chapters 2 and 5). Existing mills already have the rolling capacity to serve domestic demand for long products to 2040; what they lack is metal. They import about 60% of their iron units as billets from a narrow set of origins, and the largest of them has just arranged dedicated financing to keep doing so [S03][S20][S21]. A domestic supplier of billets would therefore sell into an existing market with identified buyers rather than into a market it must create.

Three conditions determine whether that supply is viable.

The first is cost. A domestic billet must reach a Douala or Kribi mill at a cost comparable to imports, which on 3 October 2026 were quoted at US$465 to 480 per tonne FOB from China and Russia and land at about US$570 to 650 after freight, port charges and the 10% duty [S22][S23]. Section 8.6 puts the cash cost of a Kribi billet made from imported scrap and hot-briquetted iron at about US$590 to 780 per tonne, level with imports only when power and metallics are cheap. The decisive local variables are the price of iron units and the duty paid on them, the tariff for electricity and the efficiency of the melt shop.

The second is reliability. Re-rollers value consistent chemistry and on-time delivery because their mills run continuously and their own customers buy against homologated prices. A local supplier can offer shorter lead times and smaller lot sizes than an ocean shipment, which reduces the working capital tied up in imported billets.

The third is feedstock. Domestic scrap is limited and already contested; its purchase price has risen by about 30% [S01][S116]. A melt shop sized for merchant billets must therefore plan from the outset for imported or domestically produced direct-reduced iron, hot-briquetted iron or pig iron. In the longer term, ore-based iron from Cameroon’s deposits is the logical source, and the government’s 2026 to 2030 iron-ore programme makes that possibility more concrete [S72][S31].

9.3 Sections second

Sections and structural steel are the fastest-growing segment in the scenarios, from about 50 kt to about 120 kt in the base case by 2040 (Chapter 7). They are used in industrial buildings, warehouses, bridges, transmission and telecommunications towers, port facilities, mines and the frames of commercial buildings. Cameroon rolls light angles, channels and flats, but imports its heavy sections, beams and fabricated structures [S05][S117].

Three features make sections attractive. Heavy sections and beams are fully imported, so a domestic producer replaces imports rather than competing with local mills. They are not homologated, so their price is set by import parity plus logistics, which includes the lead times and working capital costs that a local supplier avoids. And the infrastructure pipeline described in Chapter 3, including railways, port terminals, power lines and mines, is shifting demand towards them. Neighbouring CEMAC states, which have no section mills, offer an additional market.

The barriers are real. A section mill needs billets or blooms of suitable size, which reinforces the case for a melt shop. Sections are sold to engineers and contractors who require certified products to recognised standards, test certificates and reliable dimensions. Cameroon’s mandatory standards cover reinforcing bar; standards for structural sections would need to be applied and enforced in public procurement for local producers to compete on equal terms with certified imports (Chapter 10).

9.4 Certified reinforcing bar, and only certified

Reinforcing bar is the largest single product in the market and will remain so, but it is saturated: 627 kt of reported capacity against about 180 kt of demand [S03]. Even in the high scenario, rebar demand in 2040 stays below today’s capacity (Chapter 7). A new producer cannot expect to win market share on volume or price in a market where existing mills run at about half capacity and prices are administered.

There are, however, three ways in which new rebar tonnes can add value rather than merely add capacity. The first is certified quality. The market has seen disputes about grades, regulatory action over a grade outside the standard, consumer complaints about quality and reports of counterfeit bars [S80][S26][S110][S111]. A producer that guarantees compliance with NC 236/2024/06, offers traceable mill test certificates and supplies high-ductility grades for engineered structures can serve demanding customers, such as public works, foreign-financed projects and large private developers, who today rely on project derogations or accept uncertainty. The second is integration: bars rolled from the producer’s own billets are insulated from billet-price shocks that affect re-rollers. The third is regional reach: Chad, Gabon, Congo and the Central African Republic import reinforcing bar, though Gabon’s new mills and VAT preference make that market more contested (Chapter 6) [S29].

9.5 What customers need from a new producer

Each customer group in the Cameroonian market values something different, and a new producer’s offer should be designed around those needs rather than around its own product list.

Re-rolling mills, the potential buyers of merchant billets, need consistent chemistry, the right section size for their mills and reliable delivery. The bar mill ordered by GSM in Tanzania in 2026, for example, is designed for 150 mm billets [S67]. Re-rollers also need credit terms that reflect the homologated price at which they sell. A domestic supplier can offer smaller and more frequent deliveries than an ocean shipment, reducing the stock that each mill must finance.

Contractors and engineers, the buyers of sections and structural steel, need certified products with test certificates, dimensional accuracy and availability on the project schedule. For publicly funded and foreign-financed projects, compliance with international standards is often a contract requirement. Delivered price matters, but so does the cost of delay.

Distributors and hardware merchants, who sell most reinforcing bar to households and small builders, need a full range of diameters, steady supply and margins compatible with homologated prices. They are the channel through which quality certification reaches the self-built housing market.

Regional buyers in Chad, Gabon, Congo and the Central African Republic need reliable logistics and payment in CFA francs, which a Cameroonian supplier can offer (Chapter 6).

9.6 Scale and phasing

The size of the market argues for phased capacity. The iron-unit gap of about 170 kt today and the sections market of about 50 kt are of the same order as a single modern melt shop or section mill, not several. New bar and wire-rod mills ordered for Africa in 2026 are sized at about 300 kt a year [S67][S68], and modern United States micro-mills at 0.39 to 0.45 Mt (430,000 to 500,000 short tons) [S128][S167][S168]. Direct reduction modules have become smaller: an Energiron micro-module of 0.25 Mt a year entered service in Bolivia in October 2025, alongside single modules of up to 2.5 Mt a year such as Tosyali’s in Algeria [S13][S169]. A producer can therefore match capacity to the market in steps, adding melting, rolling and eventually iron-making as demand and feedstock allow, rather than committing to a full-scale complex at once.

9.7 Flat steel: a gap that scale does not yet justify

Flat steel is the second-largest import gap, about 96 kt in 2023, and it grows to about 203 kt by 2040 in the base case (Chapters 4 and 7). But flat steel is made on hot strip mills that are normally built for several million tonnes a year; Tosyali’s flat-products complex in Algeria, for example, has a capacity of 2.5 Mt a year [S119]. A Cameroonian flat mill would need to export most of its output from the start, into a world market with large surplus capacity in flat products. The realistic near-term role for a local producer in flat steel lies downstream, in coil processing, roofing sheet and tubes, where Cameroon already has more capacity than domestic demand [S03]. A flat-rolling project would make sense only as part of a regional strategy at much larger scale.

9.8 Cameroon Steel’s project as a worked example

Cameroon Steel’s own project illustrates how these market priorities translate into a plant. The public record is as follows. Cameroon Steel is developing a steel complex at Mboro, in the Kribi industrial-port zone; the foundation stone was laid on 30 December 2024 by the Prime Minister, representing the Head of State [S170]. Its design capacity was reported in January 2025 as 1 Mt of steel a year, to be built in phases [S32]. Its sister company, Cameroon Mining Company, holds the exploitation permit for the Mbalam iron-ore deposit [S170]. The Kribi industrial-port zone lists "steelmaking linked to mineral exports" among its development clusters [S91].

Cameroon Steel’s reference configuration RC-1, a planning estimate, divides the complex into three phases and a reserve [S33]:

• Phase 1 (planned): an electric arc furnace melt shop with ladle furnace and billet caster, feeding a reinforcing-bar mill and a high-speed wire-rod mill (bars of 8 to 32 mm and wire rod of 5.5 to 12 mm). Nameplate capacity is 0.3 Mtpa of finished products and expected sustained output about 270 to 300 kt a year. On the planning schedule, works start in 2029, the first heat follows in the second half of 2030 and ramp-up runs through 2031.
• Phase 2 (indicative): a second melt line and a light and medium sections mill, for about 150 to 200 kt a year of angles, channels and flats.
• Phase 3 (indicative): melt-shop expansion and a heavy sections mill for H-beams and I-beams, for about 500 kt a year, bringing the complex to about 1 Mtpa.
• Reserve: a direct-reduction module that would turn Cameroonian ore into iron units, subject to ore quality and gas supply.

Read against the evidence of this paper, the configuration has three features worth noting. The melt shop is the element of Phase 1 that addresses the country’s real deficit, because it produces billets. Its output is flexible: billets can be rolled in-house into wire rod and reinforcing bar, or sold as merchant billets to re-rollers that import about 60% of their charge, whenever that is worth more than rolling them [S03][S05]. The later phases target sections, beams and heavy structures, which are the fastest-growing imported products in the scenarios. And the rolled output of Phase 1 enters the most saturated segment of the domestic market, where rebar capacity is about 627 kt against demand of about 180 kt [S03]. New rebar capacity therefore closes no gap on its own: Phase 1 tonnage has to go to import displacement, of billets first and wire rod second, and to regional exports. White paper 03, Chapter 9, sets out the phased pathway in engineering terms.

Table 9.2 shows two illustrative ways of placing Phase 1’s sustained output. In a billet-led mix about half of it leaves the plant as merchant billets, and domestic rebar sales grow roughly with the market, which adds about 55 kt of rebar demand between 2025 and 2031 in the base case. In a rolled-led mix Phase 1 would have to sell 150 to 170 kt of rebar in Cameroon, about two-thirds of the base-case market in 2031, which it could do only by taking volume from mills that already run at about half their capacity.

The billet-led mix is the one consistent with the market evidence, but its viability depends on cost: at October 2026 prices and on imported iron units, a Kribi billet is level with an imported one only in the low case of section 8.6. Phase 1 would also bring in about 351 kt a year of scrap, hot-briquetted iron and consumables through Kribi, against about 30 kt of domestic scrap, so on its own it would shift the country’s dependence from imported billets to imported iron units rather than remove it [S33]. The configuration is therefore most valuable as the first step towards iron units made in Cameroon, and the evidence argues for selling billets whenever they are worth more than bars. White paper 09, Chapter 7, examines the same competitiveness question for reinforcing bar.

The configuration is indicative and will be refined through engineering and market work. Nothing in this section is an offer, a forecast of the project’s output or a commitment.

9.9 Market risks

Any producer entering this market faces risks that can be identified from the evidence. Table 9.3 summarises them with an indicative rating and the main mitigations. The ratings are judgements, not measurements.

Table 9.3 derivedPrincipal market risks for a new steel producer in Cameroon

Source: Cameroon Steel analysis of evidence in Chapters 1 to 8 [S09][S22][S03][S20][S01][S116][S04][S24][S92][S36][S113][S142][S21][S29][S67][S68]. Ratings are analyst judgements.

The risks interact. Low import prices and domestic overcapacity are two sides of the same surplus; feedstock and power determine whether domestic iron can compete with imports at all; and policy decides how much of the market is open to imports. The mitigation common to most of them is to position a new producer where the market is short, iron units and sections, and to compete on cost, quality and service rather than on protection.