Final Thoughts
January 5, 2015
Final Thoughts
Written by John Packard
We provided full year projected steel imports in tonight’s issue. Please be aware: 1) the November numbers are Preliminary Census and should be very close to accurate, 2) the December numbers are based on license data and there can be fluctuations in the Census and license data numbers. November is a good example. November license requests totaled 4,069,148 net tons (all steel mill products) while the Preliminary Census data for the month came in at 3,635,036 net tons, a difference of 434,112 net tons!
Early last year, David Phelps (former president of the American Institute for International Steel) wrote an excellent article about the SIMA licensing process and what everyone needs to consider when looking at the data. At SMU we couch our numbers during the month when we say the numbers are “trending” toward a certain level as we know there can (and will be) adjustments to the numbers until the Final Census numbers are announced. By the way, we expect November Final Census numbers to come out yet this week or early next week. We will report on them when they are announced.
