Due to the Labor Day Holiday, Steel Market Update will not publish our newsletter on Sunday evening. We will publish again on Tuesday evening which is the night prior to the opening of our conference. Thursday we are not planning on producing a newsletter – or, if we do it will be a limited issue […]
This week will be the last week we will use the old USS extras in our .060″ G90 galvanized index and cost calculations. The extra is changing from $3.00/cwt to $3.45/cwt. Please make a note of this. Before the end of this week we will revise our Price Estimator on the website to incorporate the […]
When I think about selling steel what I am actually doing is thinking about the sales process. The process is the various steps needed to identify, qualify, quantify, engage and close business with any prospective account. Successful salespeople, no matter what the industry or product, understand the various steps that they follow as they pursue […]
OMG – It is the last full week before our Steel Summit Conference. Our days (and nights) are cram packed as we work with our speakers to provide their power point presentations, answer any questions that they may have and make sure that as many as possible will be staying for our networking/cocktail party on […]
SMU Steel Buyers Sentiment, which measures how buyers and sellers of flat rolled steel feel about their company’s ability to be successful in the current market environment, continues at very optimistic levels. However, our Index has seen some erosion of enthusiasm as our Index has dropped 9 points since we recorded our record high of […]
Both manufacturing companies and service centers reported similar results regarding the status of spot pricing out of the distributors into their end user customers. Manufacturers reported distributors spot pricing as being either stable (no change) which gathered 73 percent of the responses or rising which attracted 23 percent of those manufacturing companies who responded to […]
Average mill lead times declined ever so slightly across all of the flat rolled steel products being watched by Steel Market Update. We have seen lead times bouncing within a relatively narrow range over the past couple of months as we continue to see a stable market. Hot rolled lead times averaged 4.30 weeks down […]
Based on our latest Steel Market Update analysis of the flat rolled steel markets, we are learning that the domestic steel mills were more willing to negotiate galvanized and Galvalume pricing than hot rolled and cold rolled steel pricing. The largest movement we saw was on Galvalume where 64 percent of our respondents reported the […]
The Steel Market Update Price MoMo Index for flat rolled steel in the U.S. remained positive this week for the fourth consecutive week after being in negative territory for the prior six weeks. MoMo, a trailing indicator, is measured as a percentage and shows the relation of the current hot rolled coil (HRC) price movements […]
We will publish our steel survey results tomorrow for our Premium Level members. Look for them to be on the website by early afternoon. The upcoming Steel Summit will be held iat the South side of the Georgia International Convention Center (GICC). The south side is the closest to the SkyTrain and the Marriott Gateway […]
Service center flat rolled shipments rose by 7 percent or, 1 percent more than we had forecast when we last produced our Apparent Excess/Deficit report for our Premium subscribers. Flat rolled shipments in July averaged 108,800 tons per day up from the 101,700 tons per day shipped last July. At the end of June we […]
One of the Steel Market Update proprietary products is our U.S. Service Center Apparent Inventory Excess/Deficit report and forecast. Once per month, SMU analyzes the MSCI flat rolled steel shipments and flat rolled steel inventories and we calculate whether the steel distributors are either over-inventories (excess) or under-inventoried (deficit) based on our proprietary formula. We […]
We are now two weeks away from the opening of our 4th Steel Summit Conference and our first two day conference. I am quite pleased at the response that we have received from a number of different fronts regarding our conference. Our conference is being held on September 3 & 4 which is only two […]
The Metal Service Center Institute (MSCI) reported shipment and inventory data to paid subscribers on Friday. The steel industry media will receive the data on Monday. Steel Market Update will produce a number of reports based on the MSCI data. We will have our normal shipment and inventories for the U.S. and Canada for our […]
The Steel Market Update Price MoMo Index for flat rolled steel in the U.S. remained positive this week for the third consecutive week after being in negative territory for the prior six weeks. MoMo, a trailing indicator, is measured as a percentage and shows the relation of the current hot rolled coil (HRC) price movements […]
I got a note from a manufacturing company regarding the size of the Nucor move on galvanized coating extras. The comment that was made was, “Zinc average for 2014 is up 8.6% since average of 2012. Nucor increase is way too high.” This steel buyer went on to comment, “Aluminum average in same time period […]
We are starting to learn that the holdup on the flat rolled dumping suits has been due to the desire by the domestic mills to protect the automotive companies. If suits are filed look for exclusions on I.F. steels and potentially coils wider than 60 inches. We have heard from both mill and non-mill sources […]
If we start with the premise that the consumer is almost 70 percent of GDP and that steel consumption is closely correlated with GDP, then consumer behavior and, in particular, debt is very relevant to our future businesses. Consumer spending is driven by income and both the perception of current debt and willingness to take […]
Last week, Steel Market Update (SMU) conducted our early August flat rolled steel market survey. We emailed invitations to approximately 600 companies who are actively involved in either buying or selling flat rolled steels. This past week 45 percent of the respondents were from steel service centers, 43 percent were manufacturing companies, 7 percent were […]
As mentioned in a previous article in this newsletter, during our flat rolled steel market survey process we break out the different market segments into questionnaires that are dedicated to their industry. This allows us to compare market trends to see if they match. A good example is manufacturing demand. We asked manufacturing companies if […]
As of Monday we will have 16 working days before our 4th Steel Summit Conference (22 total days) and the work only gets more intense for those of us working to put on a great conference. There is still time to register which you can do on our website: www.SteelMarketUpdate.com or by calling our office: […]
This afternoon, Steel Market Update reported the SMU Steel Buyers Sentiment Index +68 for early August 2014. This is the highest level ever recorded and the most optimistic we have seen buyers and sellers of flat rolled steel since the Sentiment Index began in November 2008. Positive numbers (above zero) indicate an optimistic attitude exists […]
Domestic steel mill lead times on flat rolled steel are starting to extend compared to what we measured two weeks back. For most of the year lead times have been running within a relatively narrow window (see graph). The new data is suggesting lead times may be breaking above normal patterns. Based on our latest […]
Based on the latest flat rolled steel market survey conducted by Steel Market Update since the beginning of this week, steel buyers and sellers reported the domestic mills as being less willing to negotiate hot rolled steel prices and continue to be less willing to negotiate cold rolled prices. When we reviewed the data on […]
The Steel Market Update Price MoMo Index for flat rolled steel in the U.S. remained positive for the second consecutive week after being in negative territory for the prior six weeks. MoMo, a trailing indicator, is measured as a percentage and shows the relation of the current hot rolled coil (HRC) price movements against the […]
Earlier today you should have received a special issue newsletter about our upcoming Events – Steel Summit, Steel 101 workshop and Managing Price Risk II. There is a ton of information in that newsletter and you are welcome to forward it around the country. Probably the one thing of the most interest is who is […]
You may start to notice that we are beginning to “tweak” our new website. It has been online for approximately 8 months and we have identified a number of areas which we think we can improve for both our existing customers and those coming to our website for the first time. We have changed the […]
We will conduct our early August steel market analysis (survey) beginning first thing on Monday morning. If you receive an invitation to participate please take a few minutes to click on the link which will take you to SurveyMonkey.com where you can interact with our questionnaire. If by chance you would rather direct someone else […]
The SMU Key Market Indicators is a Premium Level product produced by Peter Wright in collaboration with Steel Market Update. Our Executive Level members have been getting access to all of the Premium Level data for the month of July (today is the last day). This includes access to all of the Premium data which […]
The Steel Market Update Price MoMo Index for flat rolled steel in the U.S. turned positive this week after being in negative territory for the prior six weeks. MoMo, a trailing indicator, is measured as a percentage and shows the relation of the current hot rolled coil (HRC) price movements against the previous 12-week average […]