The U.S. and Canadian Coast Guard are working to keep maritime lanes open in the Great Lakes as the shipping season draws to a close. Operation Coal Shovel, an ice-breaking operation that commenced January 8, has been clearing ice from the southern portion of Lake Huron, Lake St. Clair, the St. Clair and Detroit River […]
The following article on the futures markets was written by Andre Marshall, CEO of Crunch Risk, LLC. Financial Markets: The S&P continues to perform, we are last 2054 on the March futures after testing our recent low at 1981 on the 16th. It looks like we are headed back to take out the highs at […]
Benchmark hot rolled coil prices dropped again this week as buyers struggled with an oversupplied HRC market due to high service center inventories, a continuation of high foreign imports and the collapse of the OCTG and line pipe markets due to weak oil prices. Couple those three items with more domestic supply than necessary for […]
A lot has already been written about the dramatic decline in oil prices, the persistent high imports of energy tubulars, and related issues. What is missing, in my opinion, is some perspective and context to pull it all together. The purpose of this article is to show why the energy sector is so important to […]
The U.S. Department of Commerce updated its import license data earlier today. January import levels continue to be at very high levels compared to November and December and very similar to what we saw in September when imports totaled 3.9 million net tons. The daily rate is about 10,000 tons per day higher than November […]
For the week ending January 17, 2015, the American Iron & Steel Institute (AISI) estimated that the U.S. steel industry produced 1,806,000 net tons (NT) of raw steel, a 4.9 percent decrease over the previous week and a 1.0 percent decrease over the same week one year ago. The estimated capacity utilization rate is 75.1 […]
All of the flat rolled steel price indexes followed by Steel Market Update saw benchmark hot rolled pricing as being down by double digits. Exactly where hot rolled prices are seems to be debatable as we have a $43 per ton spread between the low (Platts at $565) and the high (SteelBenchmarker at $608). Since […]
The spread between world hot rolled export pricing and that of the domestic average here in the United States is shrinking based on our analysis of steel pricing data from this week. As the spread shrinks, the competitiveness of imported steel into the United States is reduced. Over time, if the trend continues, the domestic […]
A paradigm shift seems to be underway in the HRC futures market now that prices have broken through the critical support level of $600. The CRU is now at $584, which is down over 10 percent from around $665 just three months ago. With futures contracts trading at $580 per ton for the first half […]
Figure 1 shows historical gas and oil prices since January 2000. The daily spot price of West Texas Intermediate fell below $100 in August and by January 12th was down to $46.06, the latest daily figure available from the Energy Information Administration (EIA). Brent closed at $46.90 on the same day. There is no sign […]
Flat rolled steel prices continued to drop this week as the domestic steel mills struggled with holes in their order books due to growing inventories at the service centers, a sharp drop off in pipe and tube orders associated with the energy markets, and the continued flow of imported steel (which is part of the […]
The following article comes to us from one of our Asian scrap sources, Damon Sun of Daido International. The Asian scrap market is a bit quiet and continued slow downtrend as scrap metal pricing tries to find parity with iron ore. A rough calculation of scrap to iron ore is a ratio of 3.5 to […]
This is another article which generally goes strictly to our Premium level members. Steel Market Update looks at data in a number of different ways. We look at imports on a weekly basis and report on the trends for license data, we look at monthly data and how it relates to the prior month and […]
The U.S. Department of Commerce updated the import license data earlier this afternoon. Based on data collected through January 13, 2015, import licenses are lower at this point in the month than what we saw in September, October, November and December. Licenses for all steel products totaled 100,264 net tons which is much lower than […]
For the week ending January 9, 2015, the American Iron & Steel Institute (AISI) estimated that the U.S. steel industry produced 1,899,000 net tons (NT) of raw steel, a 2.3 percent increase over the previous week and a 4.1 percent increase over the same week one year ago. The estimated capacity utilization rate is 79.0 […]
As we reported last week, the $30 per ton ferrous scrap price increases failed to materialize once January negotiations began in earnest. A couple lucky deals were made up $20-$30 just as December ended and January began. However, those deals dried up almost as fast as the ink dried on the paper. We are hearing […]
All the indexes followed by Steel Market Update have breached the $600 per ton ($30.00/cwt) average level on benchmark hot rolled steel prices in North America (one exception being SteelBenchmarker who has not yet reported any pricing for the month of January). The average of SMU, CRU and Platts for this past week was $590.67 […]
In the first eleven months of 2014, scrap exports totaled 14,251,000 tonnes (metric tons), down by 15.7 percent from the same period in 2013. In the single month of November exports were 1,347,000 tonnes, almost unchanged from October. Figure 1 shows that the three month moving average has been declining slightly for the last seven […]
With the higher value of the U.S. dollar versus other steel trading nation’s currencies, we are seeing exports of steel in November as down slightly over October. November steel exports totaled 953,828 net tons (865,299 metric tons), down 5.6 percent over October but up 1.6 percent from November 2013 (all products). Here is a breakdown […]
Apparent steel supply for the month of November 2014 is 9,637,349 net tons. Apparent steel supply is calculated by adding domestic steel shipments and finished US steel imports and subtracting total US steel exports. November supply represents a 1,044,666 ton or 12.2 percent increase compared to the same month one year ago. This is primarily […]
Our report on the futures markets comes to us from Andre Marshall, CEO of Crunch Risk, LLC and the instructor for our Managing Price Risk I and II workshops. Andre will discuss the hot rolled coil futures (HRC) trading done over the past few days as well as trading of Busheling scrap (BUS) and iron […]
Ferrous scrap prices were forecast to be up $30 per gross ton as little as one week ago. According to one of our East Coast dealers there were some early sales at up $20 to $30 to those steel mills who needed to buy immediately. However, those deals were few and far between and the […]
Steel Market Update understands that a number of the steel buyers have recognized zinc spot prices have fallen below $1.00/pound and there are ongoing conversations with the domestic mills to review the extras put into place late last year. In August 2014 the domestic steel mills announced new coating extras due to the run up […]
Steel Market Update did not rush to break through the $600 barrier for hot rolled coil. We made a conscious decision that due to the Holidays we wanted to wait until this week to make sure we had as many data points as possible before breaking through $600. We are aware that some of our […]
Today we are producing two foreign steel import reports. This one is our normal report and we have a second one following which will look at imports from a different view point. The second report also addresses both long and flat rolled products and is normally available only to our Premium level members. The U.S. […]
This is our second article about foreign steel imports where we look deeper into imports from a three month moving average perspective. We also look at the complete picture by analyzing both long and flat rolled steel products. License data for December was updated on January 6th through the Steel Import Monitoring System of the […]
For the week ending January 2, 2015, the American Iron & Steel Institute (AISI) estimated that the U.S. steel industry produced 1,857,000 net tons (NT) of raw steel, a 6.4 percent increase over the previous week and a 3.9 percent increase over the same week one year ago. The estimated capacity utilization rate is 77.2 […]
All was quiet this past week as steel buyers dreamed of Sugar Plum Ferries, lower prices and better times for the New Year. Mill sales people attended to their families and toasted higher prices and better times in the New Year. All of this means not much happened last week as SMU and Platts kept […]
Most ferrous scrap pricing deals will be negotiated between the domestic steel mills and their suppliers over the next few days. Steel Market Update sources are telling us scrap prices could move up by $10 to $30 per gross ton or more depending on product and the region of the country. Mike Marley of MetalPrices.com […]
After Steel Market Update (SMU) produced our 11 month analysis of flat rolled steel imports into the United States, we received a number of comments about reality versus the perception behind the numbers. Calendar year 2014 should go down in history as the second largest number of foreign steel tonnage shipped to the U.S. by […]