Final April Import Projection

We want to remind everyone that these forecasts are being provided as a way to watch trends in the import numbers and should not be used as an actual import total for the month of April.

Our expectation is for total April imports to come in around 3.4 to 3.5 million net tons. As you can see by the table below the projected numbers on the total have shrunk as the month progressed. However, many of the individual items which we watch closely on our list have remained fairly constant.

As we look at various products we are seeing strong imports of slabs (semi-finished) which have consistently been running around 800,000 net tons. Semi-finished imports are products which do not go directly to consumers but rather to the domestic steel mills such as NLMK USA, California Steel, AM/NS Calvert and AK Steel. For your information, the twelve month moving average on semi-finished is 676,867 net tons and the three month moving average is up to 842,170 net tons (through March).

We thought our readers might enjoy taking a look back to see how our weekly projections do when compared to the final monthly numbers. As you can see the last January projection was less than the 3.2 million tons actually received. February imports we had the same scenario and then March went the opposite way (projected much more than what was actually received).