Final Thoughts

With the Final Determination by the U.S. Department of Commerce the OCTG case is not over. There will be hearings on the case on the 15th of July, post-hearing briefs and a final report by the ITC due on August 1st. The case is not slated to be “closed” until August 25, 2014 (9 days prior to our conference).

We encourage our members to read the article about the filing of a trade case earlier in this newsletter so that you can have a sense that there are two government bodies at play in each trade suit: the US Department of Commerce and the International Trade Commission and both bodies can set duties or damages against offending steel mills or nations.

Our sources advised us that the final offers to buy Severstal NA were to have been made by Friday of this past week. We learned one of the mills involved asked for an extension which was not granted. The expectation is this process will spill into the mid to later part of August before a buyer is selected. There are four groups being bantered about as potential suitors: US Steel, Steel Dynamics, CSN and JFE. There may be other mills involved as well and the expectation is there could be two or three mills selected in an attempt to push the price as high as possible. One option is that Severstal will decide not to sell but it is believed that any number over $2 billion would most likely result in a sale. Saikat Dey, CEO of Severstal NA will be one of our speakers at this year’s Steel Summit Conference in Atlanta.

We will post on our website the early registrations for those interested in learning what companies are slated to attend our conference. We hope to have the early list in place by Tuesday at the latest.

I want to welcome our newest members to the Steel Market Update family. We encourage our members to interact with us which you can do by email: info@SteelMarketUpdate.com or by phone: 800-432-3475. If you have any questions or suggestions please contact us. More than likely, if you have a questions others may have the same question. Many times we use suggestions from our members for articles and research.

As always your business is truly appreciated by all of us here at Steel Market Update.

John Packard, Publisher