Final Thoughts
Final Thoughts
Written by John Packard
June 19, 2020
Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there. I hope you got to enjoy some quality time with your kids earlier today.
There has been a call on the Commerce Department to review exports of steel and aluminum from Canada and Mexico. There is a question if exports of these products have “surged” since the two countries were eliminated from Section 232 tariffs.
We did a quick review of the products we cover on a regular basis, and the only product that comes into question is semifinished (slabs), which cannot (or are not) being supported by the domestic steel mills. Please review the following two tables (one Canada and one Mexico) and you can come to your own conclusions:
A reminder, SMU will not host our Wednesday SMU Community Chat webinar this week. Instead, we are deferring to the free CRU Steel Briefing webinar that is scheduled for 10 AM on Tuesday. This webinar will focus on the CRU steel outlook with Chris Houlden (Head of Steel for CRU), Josh Spoores (Principal Analyst), Ryan McKinley (senior analyst) and Anissa Chabib (economist). I think you will find it quite interesting. You can register for the CRU webinar by clicking here.
On Wednesday, July 1, our Community Chat speaker will be Eddie Lehner, President & CEO of Ryerson. We will have registration available later this week.
I am not going to spend time this evening providing information about the 2020 SMU Virtual Steel Summit Conference; you can find more details, including the companies that are currently registered, by clicking here.
On Wednesday, July 8, we will take a portion of the time allocated to our SMU Community Chat webinar to give some insights into our conference.
As always, your business is truly appreciated by all of us here at Steel Market Update.
John Packard, President & CEO
John Packard
Read more from John PackardLatest in Final Thoughts
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!