Fewer Tons of Prepainted Steel Imported During January

The chart below is for prepainted flat rolled steel imports. What we like to do is to show the base bare substrate and then the prepainted item as separate line items. As with many of our reports, to take the “noise” out we show the 3-month and 12-month moving averages, the change compared to the previous month and the comparison to the same month one year earlier.

Looking at cold rolled (CR) bare substrate imports were down 3.2 percent compared to December. Prepainted CR was up 5.7 percent but well below both the 3-month and 12-month moving averages. January 2013 prepainted CR imports were also lower than the same time last year.