Steel Products Prices North America

Analysis of Sheet Steel Imports by District of Entry and Source

May 10, 2017

We believe that misinformation (or lack of) about regional import volumes is often used to influence purchase decisions. Our intent with this analysis of tonnage by district of entry is to describe in detail what is going on in a company’s immediate neighborhood and thus provide a negotiating advantage for our premium subscribers.

We are now publishing monthly data in the Imports/Exports section of our website that breaks down the tonnage of the four major sheet products (hot rolled, cold rolled, hot dipped galvanized, and other metallic coated) into the port of entry and country of origin in metric tons through March. This data set is large, therefore we will make no attempt to provide a commentary. Each readers interest will be different and he/she simply needs to select one of the four products then find the nearest port or ports of entry to see how much came into their region each month and where from. It is clear from these detailed reports that the growth of tonnage entering a particular district in many cases is completely different to the change in volume at the national level.

The table included here (click to enlarge) describes the tonnage of CRC that has come in through Detroit, Houston, Laredo and Los Angeles, where it came from, the YTD tonnage and the YTD change compared to 2016. This is a small extract from one of the four spread sheets in the premium section of our web site. The total volume of CRC through March was up by 71 percent year over year but Laredo was down by 16 percent and LA was up by 215 percent. The four reports on our web site spell out the monthly tonnage by source for 32 districts around the country for HRC, CRC, HDG and OMC.

The differences between regions and the discrepancy between each region and the national total is why we think it important for both market understanding and negotiating position to know what is going on in your own back yard.

The chart shows graphically the tonnage of CRC that entered the top 10 districts in YTD March for 2016 and 2017 and is ranked by 2017 tonnage. These 10 districts account for 93.5 percent of the grand total in 2017. New Orleans received the most tonnage through March 2017 and was up by 168 percent year over year, Los Angeles was in 2nd place by volume, up by 215 percent.

The data in these detailed reports is compiled from tariff and trade data from the U.S. Department of Commerce and the U.S. International Trade Commission. Our other import reports are sourced from U.S. Department of Commerce, Enforcement and Compliance, aka the Steel Import Monitoring System. In the development of these reports by district and source country we have discovered that the SIMA data for HRC and CRC contains some high alloy steel such as stainless and tool steel which have been miss classified at the ports. These alloy steels are not included in our detailed reports which results in a discrepancy between the two data sets for CRC in particular and for HRC to a lesser degree.