Final Thoughts
Final Thoughts
Written by John Packard
May 13, 2016
I am in Ohio as we will be hosting another one of our Steel 101 workshops in Sylvania, Ohio. The accident at North Star BlueScope has resulted in the loss of our mill tour. However, I believe this program will be one of the strongest presented as we have been working overtime to fill the void left by the lost tour. We have a great group of steel people coming and I know our instructors are looking forward to this workshop.
North Star BlueScope has told us we will be welcome into their mill on a future occasions when there aren’t contractors working on repairing their steel making operations.
Our next Steel 101 workshop will be held in Memphis, Tennessee in November of this year and will include a “special tour” of Big River Steel. We will be sharing details about this program within the next couple of weeks.
We are sending out our mid-May flat rolled steel market questionnaire at 8 AM on Monday morning. If you are on our invitee list we hope you will take a few moments to click on the button in our invitation which will take you to the survey hosted on the SurveyMonkey.com website.
Take a moment to go to our website and review our Steel Summit program. We have added a couple of new speakers over the last week and we will be adding a couple more before the agenda will be closed. If you are planning on attending we recommend both registering for the conference on our website or through our offices: 800-432-3475 and make hotel reservations. We have a limited number of rooms blocked at the special $139 rate (versus the normal $239 rate). If I have an idea that we may exceed our room block I will try to increase it. Hotel rooms are subject to availability (there is another hotel across the street also owned by Marriott).
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
We had an October surprise here at SMU on Wednesday. I was working from the CRU office in Pittsburgh, and the internet connection briefly went out. As luck would have it, that happened smack in the middle of a live Community Chat webinar. Fortunately, my colleague David Schollaert stepped in, Zekelman Industries CEO Barry Zekelman rolled with the punches – and the show went on. Could there be any more October surprises in store for us and for the steel market?
Final Thoughts
We just wrapped up another Steel 101 workshop, easily the most hands-on industry workshop on steelmaking and market fundamentals, in this humble opinion. Last week on Tuesday and Wednesday, SMU’s Steel 101 was held in Starkville, Miss.
Final Thoughts
Everybody has an opinion about politics these days. More importantly for our readers, though, every business has a bottom line. A popular question in our most recent steel buyers survey asked how uncertainty around the upcoming US presidential election could affect that line.
Final Thoughts
I’m trying to make sure this is not a TL;DR Final Thoughts. As a journalism school professor once told me, ‘No one but your mom reads more than 1,000 words.’ Also, as the old adage goes, a picture is worth a thousand as well. With that in mind, below are a couple of charts that I think go a long way toward explaining how prices and lead times have been relatively stable despite concerns about demand.
Final Thoughts
It’s another week of big headlines for the world writ large – an expanding war in the Middle East, another potentially catastrophic hurricane – and not much going on in the world of steel prices. “Call me Stevie Wonder, I see nothing.” That’s how one service center executive described the current sheet market. There seems to be almost a competition among some of our Community Chat guests and contributors to outdo each other in flowery ways to say, “