Steel Products Prices North America
April 22, 2014
April Imported Steel Projection Still Above 3.5 Million Tons
Written by John Packard
Foreign steel imports, for the month of April 2014 are projected by Steel Market Update to exceed 3.5 million net tons. Based on preliminary license data collected by the U.S. Department of Commerce through April 22, 2014 imports could reach as high as 3.7 million net tons. However, as our regular readers already know, license data can be quite suspect and the final numbers could vary by a few hundred thousand tons.
This is our third projection for the month of April, all based on US DOC license data. We started doing these projections to provide a trend line for our readers and a way of keeping a history as to how accurate the license data actually is from week to week. As you can see from the table below, the projection (which we call a forecast in the table) has been moving lower each week. When SMU made our first projection it was for imports to reach 3.5 million net tons.
