Final Thoughts
Final Thoughts
Written by John Packard
December 23, 2016
Happy Holidays and welcome back to all of you who celebrated Christmas on Sunday or the beginnings of Hanukkah on Saturday evening. Most of the steel industry appears to still be on Holiday and not working through the New Year festivities. So, it was a fairly quiet day in the Steel Market Update offices around the country.
I did get an interesting email from one buyer who laid out some of the foreign steel offers his company has seen over the past week or so. we learned the cheapest hot rolled offers into Houston are $28.20/cwt to $29.35/cwt coming out of eastern Europe and the Middle East/North Africa.
We learned cold rolled prices have increased recently with Russia at the low end at $32.95/cwt Houston and Turkey at the high end at $33.95/cwt Houston.
Galvanized prices into Houston were running from a low of a $36.95/cwt base out of Russia, Brazil and POSCO Thailand around $37.20/cwt base.
We will have a Premium supplemental issue on Wednesday for our Premium members. Also, don’t forget that our flat rolled market trends analysis results from last week are on our website.
We will publish another Executive level newsletter on Thursday of this week before taking a New Year’s hiatus returning on Tuesday, January 3rd to our regular publishing schedule.
Important dates to remember for 2017: August 28, 29, 30 which are the dates for our 7th Steel Summit Conference in Atlanta. Dr. Alan Beaulieu of the Institute for Trends Research and Dr. Chris Kuehl of Armada Corporate Intelligence will join us and around 500 others associated with the steel industry as we try to understand the challenges and opportunities the industry will have in store for us as we move into 2018. Mark your calendars now.
For those of you who may have an interest, we have limited sponsorship opportunities available as well as a number of exhibitor opportunities for the 2017 conference. Contact us at: info@SteelMarketUpdate.com for information.
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’ll always have Paris,” as the famous line in Casablanca goes. And this month, the global steel industry did as well. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Steel Committee met in the City of Lights earlier this month. There was also a meeting of the Global Forum addressing excess steel capacity.
Final Thoughts
It’s once again A Tale of Two Cities in the steel market. Some are almost euphoric about Trump’s victory. Others, some rather bearish, are more focused on the day-to-day market between now and Inauguration Day on Jan. 20.
Final Thoughts
One of the perhaps unintentional perks of being a trade journalist is the opportunity to travel and cover an array of industry conferences and events. Some I've attended have been at fun locations, like Palm Springs and Tampa, Fla. Others have been in more practical locations, like SMU’s Steel Summit in Atlanta and American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI) and Steel Manufacturers Association (SMA) meetings in Washington, D.C.
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.)