Final Thoughts

If you are only registering yourself and no one else it does not matter whether you are logged into the website or not. Register away.

Even if you are unable to make our conference please mention it to your customers and steel suppliers. I got a note from one of our speakers from last year who was meeting with the CEO of a large service center group. The CEO was relatively new and unaware of our conference. The speaker contacted me and requested a brochure and any other materials we could provide to get the CEO up to date on our program, dates, where it is being held, etc. You are welcome to forward our newsletter, specific articles, blog links, Tweets, LinkedIn links (especially to our LinkedIn group which is called: Steel Market Update), company Facebook page and as well as my Google+ page.

You will receive more on this in the days to come but, in the meantime we have added a couple of new speakers to our program. With the trade suit having been filed and with all of the negotiations in Congress regrading TPA, TPP, Customs and ENFORCE legislation with language which redefines what is “material injury” for the domestic steel mills, we added Richard Chriss, Executive Director for the American Institute for International Steel (AIIS) to our “Government, Regulation & Trade” panel which will be on the second day right after Dan DiMicco’s keynote address. Mr. Chriss will join Kevin Dempsey who is the Executive Vice President and General Counsel for the American Iron & Steel Institute (AISI) as well as attorney Lewis Leibowitz who spoke to our group last year representing the free trade position. This will be a timely and very strong portion of our program.

For those of you who would like to read the Congressional Record and see what the actual language is we have the document. But, I will warn you in advance, there is a reason why there are trade attorneys.

We are also expanding our horizons a bit at this year’s Steel Summit Conference as we have added Lisa Reisman, Founder & Executive Editor of Metal Miner a sourcing and trading intelligence website for the global metals markets. Lisa will provide forecasts for a number of base metals including zinc and aluminum which are used to coat flat rolled steel products (galvanized, Galvalume, aluminized, galvanneal, etc.). We have many manufacturing companies attending our conferences and workshops and we believe a better understanding of base metals (including steel) will help everyone attending our conference. You may be interested in viewing Metal Miner’s June forecast which can be accessed on the home page of their website (click here).

We were going to announce our new “App” for the conference but we decided to wait until next week as we learn more about the functionality of the App that is being created for us. Let’s just say that our attendees, sponsors and exhibitors will realize a higher value proposition at this year’s conference.  More on this very soon.

I continue to be a borderline optimist about this market. This in spite of seeing lead times on hot rolled of one to two weeks at one mill and probably more. I have also seen galvanized lead times still in July which is unusual considering the combination of price increases and a trade suit on coated products.

I have received a number of clarification questions regarding TPA/TPP and other legislation that the Congress is working on at this time. We have asked a number of trade attorneys as well as those associated with a couple of the trade organizations to comment on what will most likely be law in a few days. We will continue to report and keep our members up to snuff on what is going on in Washington, D.C.

As always your business is truly appreciated by all of us here at Steel Market Update. We’ve still got plenty of seats available for our Steel Summit Conference and we have another week before our Early Bird Discount expires (discount is worth $200 per person). Click on this link to register.

John Packard, Publisher