Final Thoughts
Final Thoughts
Written by John Packard
June 6, 2018
I have just returned from three days in Memphis where we conducted our Steel 101: Introduction to Steel Making & Market Fundamentals workshop. We had a packed house of motivated steel people from a wide variety of companies. Nucor Hickman and Nucor-Yamato did a great job of hosting our group as we toured both steel mills. I also want to thank the Nucor team for hosting the networking dinner we had that evening. Here is what one of our attendees had to say about the workshop, “Great introduction class to How Steel is Made and the Steel Market. Hoping there is a Steel 102 that I can attend also.” Mary Aloisio, McNichols Company.
Our next steel training workshop will be at AK Steel’s new research center and we will be touring their AK Steel Middletown fully integrated steel mill. This will be different than our normal Steel 101 workshop as we will spend less time discussing the basics of steel making and more time studying the future of the steel industry with advanced high strength steels for automotive and other applications. We hope to have registration open for our “Steel 201” workshop soon. The dates will be September 18-19, 2018. More details to come soon.
As you all should be aware by now, I sold Steel Market Update to the CRU Group. The process of negotiating and then consummating the sale and now integrating into the CRU Group of companies has taken me away from doing the analysis and writing over the past couple of months. We (CRU Group and myself) are working on identifying the key items where we want to put our energies and talents to improve our products and make them more interesting or productive for our members.
One product that is at the top of my list (and may be on the top of yours) is to expand and improve the SMU Steel Service Center Inventories indexes (flat rolled and plate steel). I will be producing our “Flash” report for data providers tomorrow. I hope to have the full report done by Tuesday of next week.
We completed our early June flat rolled and plate steel market trends analysis late yesterday (Wednesday). We will have the Power Point presentation ready for those who participated in the survey this week as well as those who are Premium level members by Friday afternoon.
In Sunday’s issue we will have an interesting article about trade from Alan Beaulieu of ITR Economics. Dr. Beaulieu is one of the keynote speakers at this year’s SMU Steel Summit Conference which will be held on August 27-29 in Atlanta, Georgia.
I will be speaking at a CRU Event which will be held in New York City on Monday, June 25. Later that evening, I will be hosting the Bank of America Merrill Lynch dinner with members of the financial community and some very talented steel people.
For those of you who are concerned, Steel Market Update will continue to be run by me as its President & CEO for at least the next 3 years. None of our employees or others associated with the company will be let go. We will continue to be a “very American” company as The Chairman of the CRU Group called SMU one day during a phone conversation. Our indexes will continue, and I hope to add more things that are unique to SMU and unique to the industry. Stay tuned.
As always, your business is truly appreciated by all of us at Steel Market Update.
John Packard, President & CEO
John Packard
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Final thoughts
SMU has heard from some larger buyers who have stepped back into the market to buy at prices that, if not at a bottom, they assess to be close to one. Is it enough to stretch out lead times and send prices upward again? Or do we continue to scrape along the mid-$600s per short ton (st) as we have been doing for most of the last month?
Final thoughts
Cleveland-Cliffs Chairman, President and CEO Lourenco Goncalves had some insightful things to say today about the steel market and about a conference we suspect might be Steel Summit.
Final thoughts
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, when you add in some commentary from respected peers in the steel industry to those pictures, that may shoot you up to five thousand words, at least. In that spirit, we’ve added some snapshots from our market survey this week, along with some comments from market participants.
Final thoughts
I thought we’d have more clarity this week on Section 232, Mexico, and a potential carve-out for steel melted and poured in Brazil. As of right now, the only official comment I have is from the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR).
Final thoughts
There are just 40 days left until the 2024 SMU Steel Summit gets underway on Aug. 26 at the Georgia International Convention Center (GICC) in Atlanta. And I’m pleased to announce that it's official now: More than 1,000 people have registered to at attend! Another big development: The desktop version of the networking app for the event has officially launched!