Final Thoughts

December 30, 2017

Happy New Year and welcome back to work. For the first time in many years, I was able to get away and not concentrate all of my time and effort on the steel industry. If you have been trying to reach us between Christmas and New Years, you may have had an issue in locating someone to speak to. I closed the offices for the week as many of our employees weren’t taking all of their vacation time, so I decided it was a good time to force the team to get some rest, as I expect 2018 to be a significant year for the industry and for Steel Market Update.

A couple of quick notes: Our January Steel 101 workshop in Mobile is sold out. Our March Steel 101 workshop, which will be held in Merrillville, Ind., on March 28-29, is about 50 percent sold. The Merrillville workshop will include a tour of the NLMK USA steel mill, which is located in Portage, Ind. You can learn more about the workshop on our website. You are also welcome to call our office at 800-432-3475 or you can contact us at info@SteelMarketUpdate.com.

We have been hard at work on our 8th SMU Steel Summit Conference since before the doors closed on our 2017 conference. The location will be the same, although we are expanding our footprint in the Georgia International Convention Center. We will begin the conference on Monday afternoon Aug. 27 and it will run through Wednesday mid-afternoon Aug. 29. We will begin accepting registrations later this month. We have a number of speakers lined up, but I am going to hold off on announcements until we get closer to releasing the event for registration. Past attendees will be pleased with the quality of our speakers as will those who have never attended an SMU Steel Summit Conference in the past. Our conference is THE event to be seen and to network with others in the industry.

We have only a few sponsor spots left for the 2018 conference. We have plenty of exhibition spaces available. You can inquire about what is available by contacting Jill Waldman at Jill@SteelMarketUpdate.com or me at John@SteelMarketUpdate.com.

I am looking forward to another exciting year in the steel industry.

As always, your business is truly appreciated by all of us here at Steel Market Update.

John Packard, Publisher