Steel Products Prices North America

Analysis of Cold Rolled Imports & Who is Taking China's Place

March 3, 2016

With the US Department of Commerce making their initial (preliminary determination) ruling on antidumping (AD) we thought our readers might enjoy a deeper dive into understanding cold rolled exports out of the seven countries affected by the ruling.

We decided to begin looking at CR imports beginning in 2010, which was one of the years which was deeply impacted by the Great Recession and the collapse of the steel market in 2009. As the U.S. economy came back so did the amount of CR being exported to the U.S. It is our opinion that two factors, the high selling prices in the United States coupled with the weak economies elsewhere in the world, led to imports taking a higher percentage of the U.S. market.

The size of the U.S. market for cold rolled is approximately ten to twelve million net tons (average during 2010-2015). So, you can see why the domestic mills filed AD/CVD trade suits in 2015. The prior year just these 7 countries had captured at least 20 percent of the total cold rolled market.

As you can see in our next table, with the exception of Korea, all of the other countries CR exports have fallen off.

So, who is filling the void? Vietnam which has 39,000 tons of license requests for February. Tagging along with the rising exports by Vietnam are the following countries: Mexico (26,000 tons), Turkey (10,800 tons) and Sweden (10,000 tons). When adding in Korea these 5 countries total 103,000 tons of the 142,000 tons of license requests for February.