Steel Products Prices North America
August 5, 2014
Semi's, Flat Rolled & Long Product Steel Imports
Written by Peter Wright
License data for July was updated on August 5th through the Steel Import Monitoring System of the US Commerce Department. The SMU publishes several import reports ranging from this very early look using licensed data to the very detailed analysis of final volumes by district of entry and source nation which is published in our Premium product. The early look, the latest of which you are reading now has been based on three month moving averages (3MMA) using July licensed data, June preliminary data and May final data. We recognize that the license data is subject to significant revisions but believe that by combining it with earlier months data in this way gives a reasonably accurate assessment of volume trends by product as early as possible.
Our previous analyses have shown that the preliminary data is very close to and sometimes identical to the final numbers for a particular product. The main issue with the license data is the month in which the tonnage arrives. We are currently investigating the relationship between licensed tonnage and month of arrival in this newsletter and will publish our summary for the first six months of 2014 in the next few days.
