Final Thoughts
Final Thoughts
Written by John Packard
December 7, 2016
Scrap prices still appear to be up anywhere from $40 per ton (very early deals) to as much as $50 per ton with most of the deals done late this week in the +$50 range. Dealers have sold all of the scrap they want to dispose of during the month of December. One of our sources pointed to foreign deals being done with one of the domestic steel mills in the $300 per metric ton delivered to the USA mills.
In the Ohio Valley we heard scrap prices settled at: HMS = $250-$260 per gross ton; Shred = $285-$290 per gross ton and busheling = $280-$290 per gross ton. We heard from another source who put the overall market at HMS = $240-$250 per gross ton; shred at $265-$275 per gross ton and busheling at $280-$290 per gross ton. All prices are delivered to the domestic steel mills.
We learned late today that demand from sheet mills is what is driving scrap prices. At the moment the export market has been quiet due to a weakening Lira in Turkey and bulk freight rates increasing – both making U.S. scrap more expensive.
Even so, the expectation is we will see additional upward pressure on scrap prices as we head into January. After that we will need to wait and see if demand is strong enough to sustain the market.
A note about our business. The year 2016 will be a record year for Steel Market Update both in terms of newsletter subscriptions as well as the success of our workshops and our Steel Summit Conference. Recently we are finding that for every Executive level membership we sell, we sell two Premiums. We are also seeing a number of our existing Executive customers converting their memberships to Premium in order to get access to our survey data and other proprietary information and analysis we are producing on a weekly basis. If you have interest in learning more about upgrading your subscription please contact me at: John@SteelMarketUpdate.com or by phone at 800-432-3475.
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John Packard, Publisher
John Packard
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