Steel Products Prices North America

SMU Imports Report: Coiled Plate

June 18, 2019

SMU now offers a comprehensive series of import reports ranging from the first look at Commerce Department license data to the very detailed look at volume by district of entry and source nation. The report you are reading now is designed to plug the gap between these two. Our intention is to report regional imports for six flat rolled products every other month. This month (June), we are reporting through April.

National level import reports do a good job of measuring the overall market pressure caused by the imports of individual products. The downside is that there are huge regional differences. We believe that buyers and sellers should have an understanding of the regional differences. For example, year to date through April, total coiled plate imports were down by 12.7 percent, but the Great Lakes region was down by 27.2 percent and the Gulf was up by 77.8 percent.

Figure 1 shows the year-to-date tonnage into each region and the huge variation between them. Figure 1a presents the same data as a pie chart.

Figure 2 shows the year-to-date change for each of seven regions and the change at the national level. Volume declined this year through April in all regions except the Gulf.

Figures 3, 4, 5 and 6 show the history of coiled plate imports by region since March 2013 on a three-month moving average basis. Note, the Y axis scales are not the same.