Final Thoughts

July 20, 2016

The spread between hot rolled and cold rolled/coated steels continues to be at dangerous (my opinion) levels. The U.S. steel industry has been systematically “building a dam” (Lewis Leibowitz words) around this country in order to prevent what they call unfairly subsidized and unfairly traded plate, hot rolled, cold rolled, galvanized and Galvalume steels. The combination of restricting domestic production with the close-down of the hot end (steelmaking) at AK Steel Ashland and US Steel Granite City along with the affirmations of dumping being reported by the U.S. Department of Commerce has taken U.S. steel prices out of sync with the rest of the world. The domestic mills are getting short term benefits but, the long-term consequences could be quite a different story.

“The high domestic pricing is causing our customers to look offshore for their products and you can’t blame them. We can offer the best service and delivery but when offshore goods are 25% to 30% below our costs, we can’t compete.” This quote was left behind by a manufacturing company as they participated in our mid-July steel survey. Our Sentiment Index high optimistic trend has been broken and we will have to wait and see if there are long-term consequences to the building of the dam without balancing the competitiveness of the domestic manufacturing industry.

We believe our Sentiment Index is a forward looking indicator and it has peaked and begun to become more pessimistic. Don’t get me wrong, Sentiment is still well within the optimistic range of the index only not as high as it was two and four weeks ago.

Next week we will report some of the thoughts of one of our keynote speakers, Dr. Alan Beaulieu of the Institute for Trends Research. ITR is picking up both positive and negative economic data. We will give you his thoughts as to what direction he believes the market will go from here and, of course, those who will be attending our 6th Steel Summit Conference will get his detailed analysis of both the economic and political situation – which should be quite interesting by the end of August…

Tomorrow (Friday) we will produce our Service Center Apparent Excess/Deficit forecast and analysis as well as provide our Power Point presentation on our flat rolled steel market trends analysis from this week. Our Premium members should look for that on Friday afternoon. If you would like more information about how you can upgrade from our Executive level membership to Premium please send us a note: info@SteelMarketUpdate.com and we will do our best to convince you to upgrade…

Registrations continue to be quite strong for the Steel Summit Conference. We still have room to add more attendees. Go to www.SteelMarketUpdate.com for more details about the conference, speaker bio’s, costs and how to register. We are now only 38 days away!

As always your business is truly appreciated by all of us at Steel Market Update – and, we hope to see all of you in Atlanta!

John Packard, Publisher