Steel Products Prices North America
Steel Mills Announce $50 Plate Price Increase
Written by John Packard
November 10, 2016
Nucor Plate Mill Group was the first of the plate mills to reach out to their customers and advise them of their intention to take plate prices up by $50 per ton.
On Tuesday of this week, Nucor sent a letter via email to their customers stating, “Due to current market dynamics, plate pricing has fallen to unsustainable levels. Furthermore, raw material costs have continued to increase. This necessitates a reset in the market.” The then went on to advise all carbon, alloy and heat-treated plate would see base prices increase by a minimum of $50 per ton ($2.50/cwt).
This is the second attempt by Nucor to raise plate prices within the past month. On October 11th the Nucor Plate Group put out a $30 per ton increase on plate but none of the other plate mills followed so it failed to gain any traction.
This latest increase is not seeing the same result as the October increase as SSAB, ArcelorMittal and Evraz have all followed the Nucor lead and increased prices by $50 per ton to their U.S. customers. SSAB also put out a letter to their Canadian customers raising prices there by $60 per ton. All of these announcements were made on Wednesday, November 9th.
SMU was advised by Essar Steel Algoma that their plate prices into the Canadian market were also up by “more than $60 per ton for end of Dec/early January over what we booked in November.”
A large plate service center told SMU about the announcements, “I expect that they will recoup all of the increase in scrap for Nov, but beyond that it will be difficult to collect. Demand is still bad, lead-times are still short. So, my best guess is that the mills collect $30 minimum but up to $40 of this increase. I would expect that this is only the first of a few announcements we will see over the next few months as we continue to see raw material costs go up. Once those costs peak and start to retreat, I am worried that we will see pricing retreat as well, based on what we are hearing for demand next year from our customers.”
John Packard
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