Steel Products Prices North America
September 23, 2014
Steel Import License Data Suggest September Will Be a Big Month
Written by John Packard
Through the 23rd of September foreign steel import licenses continue to suggest that September imports could exceed the 4.0 million net tons reported in the final census numbers for May 2014.
The license data suggests that the biggest surge in imports will move through the domestic steel mills as semi-finished import licenses are trending toward one quarter of all steel imported into the United States. Semi-finished steels are slabs, blooms and billets and each are used to produce flat (slabs) or long products including seamless pipe (blooms, billets). Semi-finished are on pace to exceed both the 12 month and 3 month moving averages for the product. The countries exporting the most semi-finished products to the U.S. are Brazil and Russia which combined have requested 84 percent of the licenses.
