Steel Products Prices North America

Hot Rolled Coil Imports by District of Entry and Source Nation, April 2019

Written by Peter Wright

June 21, 2019

This analysis breaks down the imported tonnage of hot rolled coil into the district of entry and the source nation. We believe that misinformation (or lack of) about local import volumes is often used to influence purchase decisions. Our intent with this analysis is to describe in detail what is going on in a company’s immediate neighborhood and thus provide a negotiating advantage for our premium subscribers.

Premium members will find a report on our website that break down the import tonnage through April into the port of entry and country of origin for HRC in metric tons. This data set is large; therefore, we will make no attempt to provide a commentary. Each reader’s interest will be different and he or she simply needs to find the nearest port or ports of entry to see how much came into their locality each month and from where. Monthly data is provided back to January 2017. It is clear from these detailed reports and from our companion reports by region that the change in tonnage entering a particular district in many (or most) cases is completely different from the change in volume at the national level.

Here are some examples to illustrate why this information can be actionable:  Total HRC imports through April year to date were down by 23 percent year over year. New Orleans, which was completely shut out in 2018, was up by over a factor of 6,000. At the other extreme, the tonnage through Detroit was down by 41 percent year to date.

The table included here is a small part of the detailed analysis of the HRC sheet tonnage. The bar graph shows the tonnage that entered the top 10 districts through April year to date for 2018 and 2019 ranked by 2019 tonnage. These 10 districts accounted for 96.3 percent of the HRC total in 2019 YTD. Even with the decline of 41 percent, Detroit still had by far the most volume followed by the Columbia Snake and Houston. Canada supplied almost all of the HRC tonnage into Detroit in 2019. 

The data in these detailed reports is compiled from tariff and trade data published by the U.S. Department of Commerce and the U.S. International Trade Commission. Our national level import reports are sourced from U.S. Department of Commerce, Enforcement and Compliance, aka the Steel Import Monitoring System. In the development of these reports by district and source country, we have discovered that the SIMA data for HRC contains some high-alloy steels such as stainless and tool steel, which have been misclassified at the ports. These alloy steels are not included in our detailed reports, which results in a small discrepancy between the two data sets.

Peter Wright

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