Imports Forecast to Be 3 Million Tons in February

During the fourth week of February Steel Market Update conducted our third monthly forecast projecting the number of foreign imports due into the United States during the month of February. What Steel Market Update does each week (except the first week of the month) is to review the U.S. Department of Commerce import license data and then, based on the most recent numbers, project import levels by product for the month. Based on import license data through February 25th (the most recent released to date) we believe total imports on all steel products will be just over 3,000,000 net tons.

As you can see by the table below, the 3 million ton forecast is much lower than the 3.5 million tons being projected earlier during the month of February based on license data available during those weeks. As we have warned our readers in the past it is important to realize that license data can be quite volatile and the actual final census numbers can be much different than what was being indicated by the licenses. We encourage you to read an article by David Phelps on the subject which was published by Steel Market Update earlier this year (the link is to a blog post which is available for anyone to read).