AK Steel: Two Sided Coin

There are always two sides of a coin. When looking at AK Steel, buyers are seeing a mill aggressively offering hot rolled at the lower end of the SMU HR pricing range while, at the same time, fully annealed cold rolled and galvanized are on an inquire only basis. Steel Market Update has received mixed messages as to the reasons for the problems on CR and coated. One theory is that the mill took more contract business than they could absorb – especially after having problems with their blast furnace at Middletown during the summer of 2013.

The combination of catching up on orders affected by the outage, along with building inventory for their new contracts taken later in the year, has screwed up what is otherwise known as a normally on-time mill. The second theory is the mill is having production problems at Ashland and can’t seem to ever catch up.