Final Thoughts
Final Thoughts
Written by John Packard
August 31, 2015
It’s been a long day for myself and my SMU team as we host our 5th Steel Summit Conference. The day began early for us with wake up calls around 5 AM after working most of the night on final presentation slides and networking with our attendees at the Marriott hotel where we are staying.
We had a great day with almost all of the 280 attendees managing to find their way to the convention center.This is an increase of 90-100 attendees from our numbers of 2014.
The comments we got throughout the day was we had a great lineup and some very interesting presentations. We will try to share some of the comments made on Thursday once we have a change to look at our notes and digest the volume of information that is being shared with our attendees. We have had a couple of surprises and some really interesting presentations. Our attendees have been challenged by more than one speaker and we look forward to tomorrow (Wednesday) when we anticipate some more fireworks.
As I mentioned on Sunday, we anticipated that this issue would be shorter than normal due to the time that we are spending hosting the Steel Summit Conference. We will more than likely publish a much larger than normal issue on Thursday as this week is a survey week on top of the presentations that we will try to share with you.
As always your business is truly appreciated by all of us here in Atlanta at Steel Summit 2015!
John Packard, Publisher
John Packard
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Final thoughts
SMU has heard from some larger buyers who have stepped back into the market to buy at prices that, if not at a bottom, they assess to be close to one. Is it enough to stretch out lead times and send prices upward again? Or do we continue to scrape along the mid-$600s per short ton (st) as we have been doing for most of the last month?
Final thoughts
Cleveland-Cliffs Chairman, President and CEO Lourenco Goncalves had some insightful things to say today about the steel market and about a conference we suspect might be Steel Summit.
Final thoughts
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, when you add in some commentary from respected peers in the steel industry to those pictures, that may shoot you up to five thousand words, at least. In that spirit, we’ve added some snapshots from our market survey this week, along with some comments from market participants.
Final thoughts
I thought we’d have more clarity this week on Section 232, Mexico, and a potential carve-out for steel melted and poured in Brazil. As of right now, the only official comment I have is from the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR).
Final thoughts
There are just 40 days left until the 2024 SMU Steel Summit gets underway on Aug. 26 at the Georgia International Convention Center (GICC) in Atlanta. And I’m pleased to announce that it's official now: More than 1,000 people have registered to at attend! Another big development: The desktop version of the networking app for the event has officially launched!