Final Thoughts
Final Thoughts
Written by John Packard
February 20, 2015
Have I mentioned lately that our next Steel 101 workshop will be held in the Chicago area and will include a tour of the NLMK Indiana mini-mill? Details are on our website or you are welcome to contact our offices at: 800-432-3475 or info@SteelMarketUpdate.com. We believe this will be another excellent program as we bring together our instructors from around the country: John Eckstein (metallurgist/flat products), Peter Wright (metallurgist/Marketing Expert/long products), Mario Briccetti (engineer/flat rolled/stainless OEM purchasing), Steve Painter (mill flat rolled/plate/tin plate mill sales) & myself (John Packard: service center/trading company/mill sales). Combined we are close to 200 years of active steel experience. Registration is now open and the class is beginning to fill.
Steel Market Update is forecasting a continuation of the service center inventory “Apparent Excess” at the end of February and March. However, the total flat rolled being held is falling which will affect lead times and pricing. We sent out a Premium newsletter on Friday with a detailed reports on MSCI inventory levels and our shipping, inventory and HRC price forecast out through June 2015. If you are an Executive level member and would like to upgrade your account to Premium, please contact our office at: 800-432-3475 or by email: info@SteelMarketUpdate.com. We can provide details and what the up-charge would be to upgrade. As with all SMU products, the first year has a guarantee. If you upgrade and then chose to move back to an Executive level membership we will refund the amount paid for that upgrade at any point during the first 12 months of your Premium membership.
For those of you on a free trial that guarantee is also part of any new membership – whether at the Executive or Premium level.
Dates to remember: May 19 & 20, 2015: Steel 101 in Chicago area; September 1 & 2, 2015 5th Steel Summit Conference in Atlanta, Georgia; March 15-16, 2016 – Management Challenge Conference in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. More details to follow on each soon. Block those dates on your calendar. We will have dates announced soon for our next Managing Price Risk II workshop which we are working on having in Chicago, Illinois in April. Also tentatively scheduled for Chicago will be our first Sales & Marketing Workshop which we are looking at conducting in June 2015. Later this year (late September/early October we will conduct another Steel 101 workshop with SSAB in Iowa.
We are hearing from some of our scrap sources over the weekend that another small drop in ferrous scrap prices – especially busheling and other prime grades – is possible for the month of March. According to Mike Marley of MetalPrices.com, many mills have not taken their February scrap as they have an over-abundance of material at the mills. Dealer sources are less pessimistic and think obsolete and shredded grades will trend sideways or may even go up due to limited flows (cold weather/snow/ice and lower buying prices).
As always your business is truly appreciated by all of us here at Steel Market Update.
John Packard, Publisher
Now for something completely different (and I mean completely), for those of you who are contemporary music buffs my son will be performing a one man show at High Concept Labs in Chicago on Friday evening February 27, 2015. High Concept Labs is located west of I-90 in Chicago at 2233 South Throop. For those of you in the Northeastern USA Ryan will be performing at Harvard University on April 16th. More details on that when I get them.
John Packard
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Final Thoughts
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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
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