Final Thoughts

Final Thoughts

Written by John Packard

May 13, 2019

Good afternoon/evening from Davenport, Iowa. Davenport is where the Mississippi River flooded the downtown area a couple of weeks ago. Water levels are down four feet from their highest point, and the flood waters reached the parking lot of our hotel before receding back across the railroad tracks. The river is still in flood stage and the park between the hotel and the river is under water.

I’m in Iowa as we are conducting one of our Steel 101 workshops. This afternoon our group toured the SSAB plate mill and got to see first-hand some of the things we discussed this morning when we went through the steel making and rolling processes.

An interesting comment I heard this morning from one of our Steel 101 attendees: “I’ve been in the steel industry for seven years. Everything I know about the steelmaking process I learned here today.”

We have published our service center number of months of supply and other pertinent data. We are very confident in the numbers we published to our data providers for both sheet and plate. We show inventories of sheet at the end of April as being slightly lower than the 2.7 months of supply we reported at the end of March. If you are a service center and would like to learn more about becoming a confidential data provider (which does not cost anything), please contact me at: John@SteelMarketUpdate.com

Registrations continue to mount for the 2019 SMU Steel Summit Conference. We have added a speaker, Ryan Smith, who is an analyst with the CRU Group and manages the CRU Steel Cost Service. I thought our conference attendees might be interested in learning more about the following differences in the cost to make steel:

  • Differences between EAF and integrated steelmaking in North America
  • Differences between Chinese mills and those in the U.S.
  • Impact scrap, DRI, iron ore, etc. have on the cost to make steel
  • What advantages does the U.S. have over other areas of the world (example: natural gas prices, oil availability, own iron ore and metallurgical coal, etc.)
  • Does the new steel mill capacity announced for the U.S. and Mexico make sense from a cost basis?
  • What do you think the next 10 years will bring to steelmaking cost models and how will the U.S. compare with the rest of the world?
  • Details on the $1.2 billion investment U.S. Steel is making in new technology at Mon Valley Works.

Ryan Smith, who is joining us from Australia, will speak on Wednesday morning just prior to our economic keynote speaker, Dr. Alan Beaulieu of ITR Economics.

To register for the 2019 SMU Steel Summit Conference, please click here or contact Events@SteelMarketUpdate.com or go to www.SteelMarketUpdate.com/Events/Steel-Summit

I hope everyone saw the announcement in Sunday evening’s issue of SMU regarding the SMU NexGen Leadership Award. Nominations are open and we noticed an oversight – you can nominate someone from outside of your company. Nominations are to be sent to: Events@SteelMarketUpdate.com If you have any questions, you are welcome to reach out to me at: John@SteelMarketUpdate.com

As always, your business is truly appreciated by all of us here at Steel Market Update.

John Packard, President & CEO

John Packard

Read more from John Packard

Latest in Final Thoughts