In my opinion, and this comes from my own experience, some of the products that china makes from this stuff are of inferior quality. My example is the supposedly 18/10 "stainless" chinese stainless steel cookware, well they are hardly what they profess, "stainless". After a couple of uses they were stained real bad. My thoughts are that pig iron is an inferior product and will always remain so. It has its place but, that place will be limited because of the lower quality. In my life experiences if you want quality you have to pay a little more. With the rising costs of energy, and the diminishing availability of NI ore in the world, the drive to keep our air clean, and the ever increasing demand for wages to keep up with costs, will always keep the price of the production increasing,while keeping the quality low.