Steel Products Prices North America

Regional Imports, Cold Rolled Coil, Through June

August 12, 2019

Year to date, June, total cold rolled imports were down by 23.4 percent, but the Gulf North was down by 53.2 percent and the Rio Grande was up by 5.7 percent.

SMU now offers a comprehensive series of import reports ranging from the first look at licensed data to the very detailed look at volume by district of entry and source nation. The report you are reading now is designed to plug the gap between these two. Our intention is to report regional imports for six flat rolled products every other month. This month, we are reporting through June.

National level import reports do a good job of measuring the overall market pressure caused by the imports of individual products. The downside is that there are huge regional differences, and we believe that buyers and sellers should have an understanding of regional differences. Figure 1 shows the year-to-date tonnage into each region and the huge variation between them. Figure 1a presents the same data as a pie chart.

Figure 2 shows the year-to-date change for each of seven regions and the change at the national level. Volume declined this year through April in all regions except the Rio Grande valley. Almost all through Laredo.

Figures 3, 4, 5 and 6 show the history of CRC coil imports by region since March 2013 on a three-month moving average basis. Note, the Y axis scales are not the same.