Final Thoughts
Final Thoughts
Written by John Packard
August 3, 2016
The U.S. Department of Commerce will announce their final determination on the hot rolled antidumping (AD) and countervailing duty (CVD) trade suits against Brazil, Australia, Turkey, United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea and the Netherlands tomorrow (Friday) afternoon. We will publish an article on our website as soon as we get the results which normally come late in the afternoon. I have spoken to a couple of the traders involved in the suits and their expectation is for the preliminary determinations to remain in place. The question for the industry is, will South Korea and Australia be hit with higher margins than what they received in the preliminary phase?
I spoke with one company this afternoon who had just come out of an ITC hearing on HRC. The ITC has the final say and they are scheduled to present their final determination around the 17th of September (the ITC has been early on CORE and CR announcements). I was told that the ITC hearing “…was better than CR.”
That same person who attended the ITC hearing told us that 50 percent of the imported hot rolled is being imported by two domestic steel mills: USS/POSCO and Steelscape. Both mills are located on the West Coast where there isn’t any flat rolled steelmaking facilities. USS/POSCO is 50 percent owned by POSCO out of South Korea who has been the mill’s biggest supplier. Steelscape is owned by Bluescope out of Australia. Did you note my comment in my opening paragraph above? If South Korea and Australia are somehow hit hard enough to take them out of the U.S. market there will be some scrambling on the West Coast…
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