Analysis
Final Thoughts
Written by John Packard
February 8, 2017
The Nucor Louisiana DRI plant is down for 4-5 weeks according to information just received by SMU from Nucor spokesperson Katherine Miller. Here is what she told us: “We recently had an equipment failure that has temporarily stopped production at our Louisiana DRI plant. Due to the nature of the DRI process and the cooling time required to examine the equipment, we do estimate that it will take 4-5 weeks to make the necessary repairs. Our Trinidad DRI faculty continues to operate at full capacity and we anticipate no disruptions in our raw material pipeline. This stoppage is also not expected to disrupt production at any of Nucor’s steel mills, nor impact our 180 teammates who work at the facility.”
One of our sources who has contacts close to the plant advised is that the outage is “no big deal.” We will report more once we have a better understanding of the issues with the facility.
Only 199 days until the start of the SMU Steel Summit Conference in Atlanta. We received two more speaker confirmations today and our program is coming together very nicely. As you can imagine Ray Culley and I struggle with making sure our program is current, relevant and provides value to those attending our conference. I also tend to be a little anal about making sure the individuals are good communicators. There is nothing worse than putting together an exceptional program only to find out one of the speakers is, well, boring. We work very hard to limit, if not totally eliminate, those speakers.
I am still looking for a CEO of a manufacturing company who can speak to the market segment(s) their company covers. We currently have one CEO committed, one pending and we are looking for a third.
You can watch as we add new speakers as we will add their bio’s and photos to our website once they are confirmed.
Registrations, both individual and group, for the conference are slowly starting to build as we work toward attaining our goal of 500 attendees. The special room rate we have at the Marriott Gateway is not guaranteed and is only available until we reach the end of the block. We know that there will be more people than blocked rooms. At the same time we have three hotels now as part of the Gateway/convention center area. All are reasonably priced and within walking distance of the convention center.
Our next Steel 101 workshop in April in Ohio is already 50 percent sold out. You can find more details and registration information on our website or you can contact our office: 706-216-2140, 772-932-7538 or 800-432-3475.
As always, your business is truly appreciated by all of us here at Steel Market Update.
John Packard, Publisher
John Packard
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