World Hot Rolled Price Analysis vs. USA Pricing

In the last issue of SMU, the Final Thoughts article had information from the financial community with a Bloomberg graphic pointing out the difference between U.S. benchmark hot rolled coil prices and those from the rest of the world. The premise being the $190 spread recognized by the financial community was unsustainable. The net result inferred U.S. prices would have to attract foreign tons thus pressuring pricing.

We received a number of comments and questions regarding the math associated with that article so we thought it wise to produce one of the graphs we keep internally within our company. In the graphic below we are using the SMU hot rolled average from the end of October and we are comparing it to SteelBenchmarker hot rolled coil indices in Europe (blue), China (purple) and the world export price (green).  All price referenced are in net tons, not metric tons.