Steel Products Prices North America
February 16, 2014
US Scrap Exports through December
Written by Peter Wright
Scrap exports closed out the year of 2103 at 18,470,000 tons, down by 2,888,702 tonnes or 13.5 percent from 2012. Turkey alone was down by 1,169,000 and the Far East as a whole was down by 942,000 tonnes or 9.9 percent. Figure 1 shows the three month moving average of total exports and of the receipts of individual nations.
Exports to the Far East dropped in both 2012 and 2013 as the depreciated Japanese Yen made scrap from that source cheaper when priced in US dollars. South Korea bucked the general declining trend by continuously increasing its purchases from the US for the last five months of 2013. The major change on the upside in 2013 was Egypt who increased their purchases from the US by 134.7 percent to 872,000 tonnes. Egypt is not shown in Figure 1 as we have insufficient history to show the long term trend.
