Fresh Offers for Hyundai Plate Rolled Out to Steel-Hungry U.S. Mart

The material is slated to ship from South Korea in June or July and to hit domestic docks in July or August.

Steel Market Update’s average price for domestic plate was at $1,095 per ton ($54.75 per cwt) when this article was filed.

That means material from a well-regarded foreign mill is available into Houston and New Orleans for $115 per ton less than U.S.-made product. And the import advantage is greater once freight, particularly that to the West Coast, is taken into account.

“Anything you can buy offshore, buy it. Because the price is going to be good when it shows up,” one West Coast distributor said. He noted that freight and handling to the West Coast can be as high as roughly $180 per ton from domestic mills east of the Rocky Mountains. In other words, even if domestic plate prices correct downward, the freight component alone means that buying import is not as risky as it might ordinarily be, he said.

A manufacturer source echoed that sentiment. He said the case for imports was less a matter of price than of difficulty securing supply from U.S. mills.

“The major fire right now is availability on the domestic side,” the manufacturer source said. But he also noted that the supply squeeze on the plate side was less severe than that in a domestic sheet market where “you can’t get a pound over what they allotted you.”

The U.S. was licensed to import 30,353.44 tonnes of cut-to-length plate in February, up 42% from a preliminary figure of 21,373.64 tonnes in January and marking the highest point for plate imports since 32,090.99 tonnes in May 2020, according to Commerce Department figures.

The month-over-month gain was driven in large part by plate imports from South Korea, where February’s 7,778.20 tonnes represented a more than fourfold increase from the 1,770.50 tonnes that arrived in January, per Commerce data.

South Korea is subject to a Section 232 quota rather than to the 25% tariff that most other nations face. And South Korea’s first quarter quota limit for cut-to-length plate is 60,759.19 tonnes, according to figures from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

The U.S. was licensed to import another 5,756.1 tonnes from South Korea in March, per Commerce data last updated on Friday, March 5. That means the East Asian nation has ample room in its quota allotment in the final month of the first quarter.

By Michael Cowden, Michael@SteelMarketUpdate.com