Final Thoughts
Final Thoughts
Written by John Packard
October 4, 2017
It’s 10 PM and I am on a flight back to Florida having spent the last three days in Fort Wayne, Ind. We hosted one of the largest Steel 101 workshops in our history and the workshop went well. We spent Wednesday going over the classroom materials and then that evening our workshop was hosted by Charlie Trowbridge and the Steel Dynamics team for a networking event that included dinner. If you are in downtown Fort Wayne, you will want to try out the Hoppy Gnome. SDI and the Hoppy Gnome put on a tremendous event, which also included Jerry Henry and Pete Henry from Paragon Steel who hosted our group on a tour of their service center earlier today.
Today (Thursday) our group toured the SDI Butler plant including the EAF’s, ladle metallurgical station, caster, hot strip mill, cold mill, galvanizing lines and paint line. After that tour had concluded, we move over to Paragon Steel, which is located next to SDI, and toured one of their facilities (there are two next to SDI). Their 180,000 square foot facility is holding 68,000 tons of inventory as they feed their three slitting lines. Paragon Steel slits hot rolled, HRPO, cold rolled, galvanized and prepainted steels.
I want to thank both SDI and Paragon Steel for their hospitality and generosity.
I checked with a couple of our attendees who had Fitbit watches and discovered we used up 4,500 steps just in the SDI plant.
I will be back in the office early tomorrow morning (Friday) and we will get back to our normal routine, at least for a few weeks before John Eckstein (metallurgist and one of our Steel 101 instructors) and I travel to Chicago for Fabtech. At the Fabtech show, we produce a two-hour version of our Steel 101 workshop. If you are curious and will be attending Fabtech, our mini-workshop begins at 1:30 PM CT on Tuesday, Nov. 7. The program is called: Steel 101: Mill to Fabricator.
Our next Steel 101 workshop will be held Jan. 24-25, 2018, in Mobile, Ala. We will be touring the SSAB Mobile plate minimill. This will be our second Steel 101 workshop touring the Mobile facility (we have also been to their Iowa facility in the past) and we are looking forward to returning to Mobile. We expect the weather to be a tad warmer than what will be happening up north.
A note about what is going on in Mobile right after our workshop. The weekend after our workshop, the Senior Bowl will be held, and that weekend is the beginning of Mardi Gras in Mobile. More reasons to come to our next Steel 101 and maybe stay and enjoy Mobile for a few extra days.
As always, your business is truly appreciated by all of us here at Steel Market Update.
John Packard, Publisher
John Packard
Read more from John PackardLatest in Final Thoughts
Final Thoughts
Can technology help with pig iron and DRI/HBI tariffs?
Final Thoughts
Tariff-related noise aside, there is one basic factor keeping buyers on the sidelines. Despite recent declines, HR prices remain at historically high levels. And there is no obvious support to keep them there.
Final Thoughts
United Airlines raised eyebrows earlier this month when it provided two forecasts for 2025 – one assuming a relatively stable economy and another assuming a recession. The reason? Uncertainty around the impact of President Trump’s policy shocks on the broader economy. And it sometimes feels like we’re seeing a battle between those two narratives (stable vs recession) play out within in the pages of this newsletter.
Final Thoughts
Despite some scary headlines lately (especially about Trump potentially firing Fed Chair Jerome Powell) this is not October 2008 (financial crisis) or March 2020 (onset of the pandemic). But it sure seems like we’ve taken a relatively strong economy and poured a thick sauce of uncertainty over it.
Final Thoughts
I put some of our survey data through ChatGpt, with interesting results.