Final Thoughts
Final Thoughts
Written by John Packard
July 11, 2014
For those of you who would like to read the fact sheet sent out by the International Trade Administration (ITA) which contains the US Department of Commerce Final Determination on the OCTG trade case you can click on this link.
As I mentioned in one of the above articles, Roger Schagrin of Schagrin Associates is one of the lead attorneys on behalf of the steel mills when dumping suits are filed. If there is a filing on flat rolled steel products Mr. Schagrin will most likely be involved. He will be a speaker at our Steel Summit Conference in September.
With the Final Determination by the U.S. Department of Commerce the OCTG case is not over. There will be hearings on the case on the 15th of July, post-hearing briefs and a final report by the ITC due on August 1st. The case is not slated to be “closed” until August 25, 2014 (9 days prior to our conference).
We encourage our members to read the article about the filing of a trade case earlier in this newsletter so that you can have a sense that there are two government bodies at play in each trade suit: the US Department of Commerce and the International Trade Commission and both bodies can set duties or damages against offending steel mills or nations.
Our sources advised us that the final offers to buy Severstal NA were to have been made by Friday of this past week. We learned one of the mills involved asked for an extension which was not granted. The expectation is this process will spill into the mid to later part of August before a buyer is selected. There are four groups being bantered about as potential suitors: US Steel, Steel Dynamics, CSN and JFE. There may be other mills involved as well and the expectation is there could be two or three mills selected in an attempt to push the price as high as possible. One option is that Severstal will decide not to sell but it is believed that any number over $2 billion would most likely result in a sale. Saikat Dey, CEO of Severstal NA will be one of our speakers at this year’s Steel Summit Conference in Atlanta.
We will post on our website the early registrations for those interested in learning what companies are slated to attend our conference. We hope to have the early list in place by Tuesday at the latest.
I want to welcome our newest members to the Steel Market Update family. We encourage our members to interact with us which you can do by email: info@SteelMarketUpdate.com or by phone: 800-432-3475. If you have any questions or suggestions please contact us. More than likely, if you have a questions others may have the same question. Many times we use suggestions from our members for articles and research.
As always your business is truly appreciated by all of us here at Steel Market Update.
John Packard, Publisher
John Packard
Read more from John PackardLatest in Final Thoughts
Final Thoughts
t this point in the game I think what we can say about Nippon Steel’s proposed buy of Pittsburgh-based U.S. Steel is that it will go through, it won’t go through, or the outcome will be something new and completely unexpected. Then again, I’m probably still missing a few options.
Final Thoughts
President-elect Donald Trump continues to send shockwaves through the political establishment (again). And steel markets and ferrous scrap markets continue to be, well, anything but shocking. As the French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr wrote in 1849, "The more things change, the more they stay the same." (I thought the quote might have been Yankees catcher Yogi Berra in 1949. Google taught me something new today.)
Final Thoughts
President-elect Donald Trump will officially retake the White House on Jan. 20. I’ve been getting questions about how his administration’s policies might reshape the steel industry and domestic manufacturing. I covered the tumult and norm busting of Trump's first term: Section 232, Section 301, USMCA - and that's just on the trade policy side of things. It's safe to say that we'll have no shortage of news in 2025 when it comes to trade and tariffs.
Final Thoughts
Another presidential election cycle has come to an end. If you’re anything like me, part of you is just happy you no longer need to unsubscribe or “text STOP to opt-out” from the onslaught of political text messages this cycle produced.
Final Thoughts
With the US presidential election decided, ‘wait and see’ has quickly turned into ‘we’re about to find out.’ Following Donald Trump’s victory, I had a chance to sit down with Kevin Dempsey, president and CEO of the American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI). He gave his thoughts on what he thought we might see in Trump’s second term in office, and what it means for steel.