This week is Thanksgiving (Thursday) and we are one month away from the Christmas Holidays as well. Here is what our publishing schedule will look like over the next five weeks or so. We will publish on Tuesday of this week and then we will not publish again until the following Tuesday, December 1st. We […]
A note to our Premium level members, we will have another supplemental issue out tomorrow which will contain our Apparent Excess/Deficit forecast for carbon flat rolled service centers in the United States. We also expect to have our Power Point presentation regarding this week’s flat rolled steel analysis (survey) online by early afternoon. We will […]
For those of you who have been steady readers and members of Steel Market Update you know that the purpose of my Final Thoughts is for me to voice some of my thoughts and opinions on a wide range of topics. I am going to use this forum today to speak about what I am […]
Our thoughts and prayers go out to those affected by the events in France on Friday evening. Our hope is that the world can use the events of the past few weeks in order to galvanize efforts to ultimately rid those who would prefer the world in Chaos. We have opened registration for our Leadership […]
Even though I personally believe steel prices will probably not go too much lower from here, we still have the SMU Price Momentum Indicator pointing toward lower pricing. We are looking for signs that the slide may be about over but, we continue to see weakness on hot rolled products. We got a note from […]
I am here in New York City participating in the Cowen & Company Global Metals and Mining Conference. Day one was dedicated to the steel industry and the various commodities (scrap, iron ore, metallurgical coal). I thought I would provide a snapshot into some of the comments made during the conference by various CEO’s. Lourenco […]
I will be traveling to New York City tomorrow to participate in the Cowen & Company conference for the financial community. I will return to the office on Thursday morning. For those of you keeping up with our move – all of the phones are working properly including our main 800 number (800-432-3475). You are […]
I had an interesting conversation with a former trading company executive who was reflecting on the number of tons of Chinese galvanized steel that hit the U.S. shores in August, September and October 2015. Depending on when the preliminary determination on countervailing duties is published in the Federal Register, the Chinese mills are subject to […]
The headline that you are going to read in not only our newsletter but in other publications as well, will be that the US Department of Commerce found evidence of material injury or potential material injury to the U.S. steel industry and therefore is preliminarily imposing countervailing duties on China, Italy, South Korea and India. […]
I am aware that on October 23, 2015 the domestic steel mills filed allegations of critical circumstances on exports of hot rolled coil from four countries: Brazil, Australia, Japan and The Netherlands. I will have more details and statements from both buyers and sellers later this week. I wanted to spend time studying the affirmative […]
After three days of non-stop packaging followed by 24 hours of non-stop cleaning we have finally departed our Georgia offices and are in transit (as I write) to our new location in Florida. It is a two day trip so if you call our office you may get a voice mail message – my apologies […]
It is Tuesday evening and I continue to multi-task as the moving company shows up at 8 AM on Wednesday and after 15 years in the same location there is much to do to get ready for the move. For those that did not catch my note about this in the last issue, Steel Market […]
The difference between auto industry and steel industry: the UAW has issue a notice to GM that they could walk out at midnight tonight (Sunday) if they don’t have a contract. The USW is content to work under the old contract for as long as they can get away with it since both US Steel […]
Boxes are piled high around me as we begin to pack up our office for the move south to our new headquarters in Florida. Excuse our mess as we are trying our best. We had a good response to our latest flat rolled steel market analysis which was conducted via an online questionnaire over the […]
A reminder, if you received an email invitation to participate in our flat rolled market analysis please click on the link contained in the message. The questionnaire won’t take more than a few minutes to complete and at the end of the week we will have a Power Point presentation for all of those who […]
We will begin our next flat rolled steel market analysis with an invitation to participate in our questionnaire going out at 8 AM on Monday morning. If you receive an invite please take a few minutes to click on the link and complete the questionnaire. Steel Market Update will be moving our headquarters over the […]
As I was sitting at my desk this evening (around 8 PM ET) thinking about what I was going to write about in my Final Thoughts article, I flipped over to my second computer screen to look at the U.S. Department of Commerce site dealing with foreign steel imports. The site is normally updated every […]
Our next Steel 101: Introduction to Steel Making & Market Fundamentals workshop will be held in the Columbus, Mississippi area on January 19 and 20, 2016. This workshop will include a tour of the SDI Columbus steel mill. We are working on hotel information right now and hope to have the hotel selected by early […]
Does the U.S. Steel purchase of the former Stelco facility (Hamilton and Lake Erie Works) rank up there with the Severstal and later RG Steel purchase of the former Sparrows Point, Wheeling-Pittsburgh and Warren facilities? I remember Saikat Day, who was the CEO of Severstal NA at the time, when speaking to our 2014 Steel […]
The first rule of business travel is don’t book the last flight of the day to your end destination – especially when you have a three hour ride to the airport and, guess what, the last 20 miles are in Chicago rush hour traffic… My thanks to Mario Briccetti (Steel 101 instructor) who imitated another […]
I, Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush and a number of steel people are all in Davenport, Iowa enjoying the warmer than normal weather and great conditions to do a mill tour which is exactly what we did this afternoon (without Hillary and Jeb). I want to thank everyone at SSAB for their hospitality and for doing […]
One of the reasons SMU decided to go with an App for our Steel Summit Conference this year was the belief that the App was something that could be used prior to the conference as well as after the conference. For example, earlier today I was working on developing scrap information in relationship to iron […]
I spent part of my day today speaking to buyers who are known to buy foreign steel either due to logistics reasons (too far away from a producing mill) or who prefer to have options for pricing reasons. What I found out is a number of countries involved in the trade suits continue to quote […]
We will be in Iowa next week for one of our Steel 101: Introduction to Steel Making & Market Fundamentals workshops. We are looking forward to working with SSAB again, as we did a workshop in Mobile, Alabama and toured their Alabama facility. This is our first trip to Iowa. We are working on ironing […]
The following press release came out late this afternoon and we caught it early this evening. The announcement is about the hot rolled trade cases and whether the US International Trade Commission (ITC) found enough evidence to determine that the probability exists that the U.S. steel industry was “materially damaged” by hot rolled exports from […]
Demand (or the lack thereof) seems to be the real culprit affecting the steel market and prices at this moment. I spoke with one of the larger service centers this afternoon and asked: would imports be reduced enough to impact U.S. supply and trigger a price spike? I asked what were the chances that the […]
As we have mentioned in a recent article, there has been an intentional change in the scope language associated with the cold rolled and hot rolled antidumping and countervailing duty suits. The change in the language appears to add parts that are not part of Chapter 72 of the Harmonized Code (iron and steel). Of […]
It appears that very slowly steel buyers are slowly starting to come to a realization that there may be a lockout at US Steel and possibly ArcelorMittal as well. As many of you know, these two mills are not huge players in the spot markets so the immediate impact may be slightly muted should one […]
I am currently involved in selling our family home now that my kids are gone and we no longer need a large house. The process of dealing with listing agents and real estate sales people has sparked a number of articles about customers service and understanding who the customer really is within our newsletter/website. The […]
My opinion (and many of the items discussed in my Final Thoughts articles are just that – my opinion) is that we are getting close to seeing a disruption of services at one mill and we probably are close to possibly seeing two mills (ArcelorMittal and US Steel) lockout the USW members at their mills. […]