Steel Products Prices North America
March 17, 2015
March Steel Imports Trending Toward 3.8 to 4.0 Million Tons
Written by John Packard
Every week the US Department of Commerce (US DOC) releases steel import license data for those months that have not had Preliminary Census or Final Census data announced. The latest license data was released this afternoon (Tuesday) covering the month of March through today (March 17, 2015). Steel Market Update (SMU) takes the license data and then compares it against what we have been seeing in prior months based on data from approximately the 17th of the month (3rd week of license data). From there we can build a trend analysis to project what we think imports for the total month of March will look like and, more importantly, if they are breaking the trend we have been seeing for imports over the past few months (which is close to 4 million net tons per month – a very high amount).
SMU Note: Please be advised that the US DOC releases the data in metric tons. Steel Market Update converts all of the data into net tons (2,000 pounds per 1 net ton).
