It is anything but a normal working day here on the east coast of Florida. Hurricane Matthew is forecast to be within 65 miles of my doorstep come Thursday and Friday of this week so today has been spent preparing to evacuate. No sense playing with Mother Nature. SMU HQ will be closed on Wednesday, […]
On Friday Steel Market Update spoke with a number of trading companies as well as end users who are impacted by the circumvention complaint filed against cold rolled and coated steels coming out of Vietnam. The contention of the domestic mills is that the surge of Vietnamese flat rolled comes at the same time as […]
When looking at hot rolled coil prices U.S. buyers need to remain aware of what is going on with the rest of the world. Prices in Europe are rising and as one trader put it to us on Friday of this past week, “The Turks aren’t idiots.” Prices for HRC in the Turkish market are […]
The Steel Market Update (SMU) Price Momentum Index (MoMo) for hot rolled steel in the United States remained negative this week for the eleventh consecutive week, following a 28 week long positive streak. MoMo is a trailing indicator and shows the relationship between the current U.S. hot rolled coil price movements against the previous 12-week average […]
United Steelworkers at Cliffs Natural Resources ratified a new 3-year labor contract today. The contract is effective retroactively as of October 1, 2015 and will run through September 30, 2018. The agreement covers approximately 2,000 USW represented employees at Cliffs’ mines in Michigan and Minnesota. USW International President Leo Gerard praised USW members for their […]
The complaint filed by the domestic steel mills against China for circumvention of duties by converting Chinese substrate in Vietnam and then shipping it to the U.S. as Vietnamese products goes against trade rules that have been in place for many years. It has been understood that transforming hot rolled into cold rolled and/or galvanized […]
Sales of new single-family homes fell 7.6 percent month-over-month but were 20.6 percent higher on a year-over-year basis, according to data released by the Department of Commerce. August sales were at a seasonally adjusted rate of 609,000, compared to the upwardly revised rate of 659,000 in July and 505,000 in August 2015. The August dip was […]
Home prices continued to grow in July according to the latest S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Indices. On a year-over-year basis, the National Index rose 5.1 percent in July, up from 5 percent in June. The 20-City composite reported a year-over-year gain of 5.0 percent, compared to 5.1 percent in June. Home prices in Portland, Seattle and […]
Last week Steel Market Update invited just under 600 steel executives to participate in our flat rolled market trends survey. As is normal with SMU surveys, we intentionally invite manufacturing companies and service centers to lead the way. Last week 45 percent of the respondents came from manufacturing and 44 percent from the steel distributors. […]
Last month we based our U.S. flat rolled steel service center shipments and inventories on a relatively conservative model. Our belief at that time was both shipments and inventory receipts would be 3 percent below the 3 year average. In actuality shipments were -3.7 percent below year-over-year levels but 7.2 percent below the 3 year […]
This area of the Steel Market Update newsletter is reserved for me to be able to provide my thoughts/opinions on a variety of subjects and our readers clearly know where these comments are coming from. I have been asked on a number of occasions to comment on “rumors” of a domestic mill flat rolled price […]
Flat rolled lead times continued to slip, according to those responding to last week’s Steel Market Update flat rolled market trends analysis survey. Lead times are very close to where they were at this time last year when benchmark hot rolled was being reported at $660 per ton (September 16, 2015) and then proceeded to […]
Spot steel prices are now negotiable on hot rolled, cold rolled, galvanized and Galvalume according to those responding to our mid-September 2016 flat rolled steel market trends survey. Hot rolled continues to be (almost) unanimous with 97 percent of our respondents reporting spot prices are being negotiated by their mill suppliers. At the beginning of […]
A note to our Premium level customers, the Power Point presentation of last week’s flat rolled steel market trends analysis has been placed on the website. We will have a Premium level newsletter coming out on Monday as well. If you have any questions or need assistance to find our survey results please contact Brett@SteelMarketUpdate.com […]
The Steel Market Update (SMU) Steel Buyers Sentiment Index dropped 14 points since we last measured Sentiment at the beginning of the month. The 14 point drop took the Current Index to +49, the lowest point for our index since the +44 reported during the first week of January 2016. The 14 point drop is […]
Vehicles sales in the US are settling in to a more sustainable pace, but a strengthening labor market, low interest rates, low gasoline prices, and rising incentives are still supportive of strong demand. Moody’s Analytics expects the pace of light vehicle sales to be above a seasonally adjusted annual rate (SAAR) of 17 million units […]
Existing home sales declined for the second month in a row, falling 0.9 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.33 million in August. The National Association of Realtors suggests higher home prices and tight inventory kept buyers at bay last month, despite low mortgage rates. “Healthy labor markets in most the country should […]
The Steel Market Update (SMU) Price Momentum Index (MoMo) for hot rolled steel in the United States remained negative this week for the tenth consecutive week, following a 28 week long positive streak. MoMo is a trailing indicator and shows the relationship between the current U.S. hot rolled coil price movements against the previous 12-week average […]
The Architecture Billings Index dipped to 49.7 in August from 51.5 in July. The Northeast average dropped to 44.9 which pulled the headline index down. “This is only the second month this year where demand for architectural services has declined and it is only by a fraction of a point,” said AIA Chief Economist, Kermit […]
There have been two complaints filed with the U.S. Department of Commerce for circumvention of duties by Vietnam. One is on CORE (corrosion resistant steels like galvanized and Galvalume) and the second one is on cold rolled. Steel Market Update has seen the CORE complaint but we have not yet seen the cold rolled one. […]
Housing starts were down 5.8 percent from July to August. The U.S. Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development reported starts were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1,142,000, 0.9 percent higher than year ago levels. Single family starts were down 6.0 percent and multi-family down 6.9 percent. The housing starts […]
I got a note from Eddie Lehner, the CEO of Ryerson who attended our Steel Summit Conference for the first time this year. He dropped me a note today about our conference, “The SMU Conference is flat out worth attending. An unusual combination of candor, depth and subject matter relevance throughout the steel value chain […]
With the Wheatland Tube filing of a complaint against China using the ENFORCE Act we are about to enter the next stage of trade complaints. The Wheatland complaint is for circumvention of duties that already exist against Chinese products, so it will be interesting how quickly this first test case takes and will Customs and […]
Below is the latest release issued by the the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute (AHRI) regarding residential and commercial heating and cooling equipment shipments through July 2016. You may read the press release on their website here. Residential Storage Water Heaters U.S. shipments of residential gas storage water heaters for July 2016 increased 3.0 percent […]
The Steel Market Update (SMU) Price Momentum Index (MoMo) for hot rolled steel in the United States remained negative this week for the ninth consecutive week, following a 28 week long positive streak. MoMo is a trailing indicator and shows the relationship between the current U.S. hot rolled coil price movements against the previous 12-week average […]
When speaking to one of the main ferrous scrap analysts in the industry our newsletter was paid a compliment when I asked if the scrap community was aware of our newsletter. I was told, “They do already. Many of them have a lot of confidence in your reports. They refer to it more often then […]
The Dodge Momentum Index rose 1.3 percent in August to 134.9. Institutional construction planning gained 1.7 percent last month and commercial planning 1.0 percent. The index has made gains for five consecutive months. The Momentum Index is up 16 percent from August 2015 due to a 22 percent growth in institutional planning and 22 percent […]
I spent a great deal of time on two projects: flat rolled pricing and steel mill maintenance schedules. I want to thank those companies who worked with me over the past few working days to be able to provide what I think is better data (both in pricing and in the schedules) than what has […]
Twice per month, Steel Market Update (SMU) conducts a review of the flat rolled steel market in our quest to better understand market trends which affect steel pricing and purchasing. We invite approximately 550-600 steel people to participate in our questionnaires. Those invited come from the manufacturing segment of the industry (approximately 45 to 50 […]
The duties on automotive steel from Korea due to antidumping (AD) may affect pricing of vehicles at Hyundai and Kia here in the U.S. Dumping and countervailing duties have been determined by the Department of Commerce on imports of Korean coated, hot-rolled, and cold-rolled steel. Hyundai Steel, part of Hyundai Group, exports approximately 545,000 tons […]