Tag: conference

Falling steel prices at present are not a symptom of demand but of imports arriving into the US and to some parts of Mexico, Ternium’s CEO Maximo Vedoya said this week.

Sheet prices have fallen again this week on shorter lead times, higher imports, and potentially higher inventories. (We’ll see for sure when we release our service center shipment and inventory data next week.) I remember reporting almost exactly the same thing about a month ago and getting a fair amount of pushback. Not so much these days.

Prices for galvanized products have been falling for more than a month, and market participants expect this trend to continue in the near term.

What’s something going on in the market that no one is talking about? That’s a question on our survey, and was also posed to many who graced the stage at our Tampa Steel Conference. Perhaps another way to phrase that is “not talking about publicly” or connecting the dots of steel market chatter to find a uniting central issue. I thought one respondent to our survey really summed up the current moment: “Right now it is all politics.”

ArcelorMittal indicated that a sale of U.S. Steel to Nippon Steel could lead to it taking full control of AM/NS Calvert, its joint venture sheet mill in Alabama. "Typically, in such situations, when there is a selling partner, they sell it to the other partner in the joint venture, right. So I could imagine such a situation would develop,” Mittal said.

Russel Metals has invested a lot in recent years, and it’s not done yet.

Algoma Steel Group Inc. suffered another incident at its steel mill in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, this week.

More supply coming online and an unchanging demand environment – two key themes for 2024 – could soon bring the steel sheet storm to a market near you.

Algoma Steel reported a wider loss in its fiscal third quarter amid lingering impact from the United Auto Workers (UAW) strike and “heavy seasonal maintenance.” Additionally, the Canadian steelmaker said it has completed repairs at it blast furnace and “restored partial coke-making capabilities” after a previously reported incident on Jan. 20.

Consumer confidence in the US rose in January and accelerated to a two-year high, The Conference Board reported. Results came amid slacking inflation and expectations that the Federal Reserve could soon start cutting interest rates. The headline Consumer Confidence Index rose to 114.8 in January from a downwardly revised 108.0 in December. The index, which […]

It was another steady drip lower, down $20/st to $980/st. In other words, the kind of on-and-off declines we’ve been seeing since the start of the year.

The recession many predicted did not materialize in 2023, leading industry experts in several key end-user markets for steel cautiously optimistic for 2024.

The head of SSAB Americas talked the company's commitment to Swedish parent SSAB’s mission statement of sustainability at the Tampa Steel Conference 2024.

SMU’s latest survey results make it clear that the sheet market has hit an inflection point and headed lower. But while some market participants think that sheet prices might bottom within the next month or so, others expect a more protracted downturn.

I participated in the 35th annual Tampa Steel Conference last week, a conclave of steel producers, consumers, traders, logisticians, and (a few) trade lawyers. I participated in a panel discussion concerning challenges in managing supply chains in these troubled times. Things appear to be heading in the wrong direction in this field. Supply chains were shown to be vulnerable to pandemics in 2020 and 2021, and, in 2022 and 2023, to regional conflicts and weather slowing or stopping the free movement of goods through trade bottlenecks (the Suez Canal, the Panama Canal, the Bosporus, etc.)

Just like doing business in any part of the steel supply chain, there are risks and unknowns in trading steel. But trading companies play an important part, helping businesses navigate the risks and unknowns as they pop up.

Speaking during a fireside chat at the Tampa Steel Conference on Monday, Jan. 29, Hybar CEO David Stickler provided a status update on the company’s new rebar mill project and its plans for the future, including the possibility of a flat-rolled steel mill.

I thought Nippon Steel’s $14.1-billion deal for U.S. Steel might become a political football in this year’s presidential election. Now there is little doubt that it will after Trump told reporters in Washington, D.C., earlier this week that he would “absolutely” block the transaction – and that he would do so “instantaneously.”

If reelected in the November presidential election, Donald Trump said he would block the sale of U.S. Steel to Japan’s Nippon Steel Corp. (NSC).

The sun decided to greet us on the second day of the Tampa Steel Conference 2024. Attendees from the chillier northern parts of the continent got their dose of winter sunshine. But whatever the temps, it was inside the conference room where things really heated up. January is always a time to make sense of the year that’s just passed, and look out for the trends for the year ahead.

Algoma Steel is currently navigating a challenge as it deals with an unplanned outage at its blast furnace, but the company’s CEO is still bullish on its future as an EAF steelmaker.

With rising steelmaking capacity and relatively flat demand, industry analysts are predicting lower prices for sheet products this year.

Rising geopolitical tensions may threaten stability, while other factors like a climbing stock market and growing government investment point to one thing in the economy: it’s complicated. “It’s an interesting contradiction out there,” said Dr. Walter Kemmsies, managing partner of The Kemmsies Group, at the Tampa Steel Conference this week. In his keynote speech on […]

I’m writing these final thoughts from the JW Marriott in Tampa. And I’m looking forward to seeing some of you reading this in just a few hours at the opening networking reception of the Tampa Steel Conference. Nearly 550 people will be there – a new record for the event. If you’re looking for things […]

The Steel Manufacturers Association (SMA) outlined its praise for the US and EU extension on negotiations towards the proposed Global Arrangement on Sustainable Steel and Aluminum.

Brazilian steel maker Usiminas has resumed operations at blast furnace (BF) No. 3 at its Ipatinga works in the state of Minas Gerais. The restart comes after a BRL2.7-billion ($546-million) refurbishment on the unit, which has capacity of three million metric tons (mt) per year.

The Tampa Steel Conference is just a few days away. Here are some topics I’m looking forward to learning more about during the proceedings on Monday and Tuesday. For starters, we’ll have about a month of 2024 under our belt when we convene on Sunday. How does that compare to what we thought the start of the year would look like? And what’s the outlook for the balance of the year?

The 35th Annual Tampa Steel Conference starts in just a few days. As one of the premier domestic steel conferences, it’s the perfect way to kick off 2024. It’s not too late to register if you haven’t already done so, but make sure to book now!

This earnings season will hit a little different. U.S. Steel has announced that it won’t be hosting an earnings call. While this silence is normal during an acquisition process, it does alter a staple of the earnings landscape.

This latest SMU steel market survey is a snapshot of a sheet market inflecting lower. A significant 43% of survey respondents said that the hot-rolled (HR) coil market has already peaked. Compare that to only 8% when we released our last steel market survey on Jan. 5.