SMU Community Chat with Matt Brace and Brian Desigio of Structural Steel Products Inc.

Why should you tune in? Fort Worth, Texas-based Structural and Steel Products makes steel-intensive infrastructure goods such as transmission towers, guardrails, and highway lighting. The company should be well-placed to benefit from increased U.S. infrastructure spending.

The fly in the ointment: Record high steel prices last year and extreme volatility this year have made it more and more difficult to push forward with infrastructure projects.

The problem, as Brace and Desigio see it, is that mills can pass along higher costs to service centers, and service centers can pass them along to end users. But how do downstream consumers pass along higher costs to government entities working within budgets that don’t accommodate steel prices doubling, tripling or quadrupling?

The result can be cancelled projects and even manufacturers or fabricators going out of business.

We’ll also talk about how it’s not just the cost of steel that’s rising but also costs for labor, for zinc, for resins… for just about everything and everyone!

As always, we’ll keep it to about 45 minutes. You can (virtually) drop in, learn something – and then get on with your day.

We’ll take your questions too. So don’t forget to write some down now so you can throw them in the Q&A box on March 23.

PS – If you’d like to see past Community Chat webinars, you can find those here.

By Michael Cowden, Michael@SteelMarketUpdate.com