Steel Markets
May 31, 2015
Trader's View on Threat of Anti-Dumping Suit on Light Flat Rolled
Written by John Packard
Last month, Alfred (Al) Plummer, Sales Manager for Hanwa American Corporation, made a presentation about the steel industry at a regional meeting of the Association of Steel Distributors (ASD). Over the past few days Mr. Plummer has been communicating with Steel Market Update and we thought that the items being discussed should be of interest to our readers with the goal being to open a two-sided conversation about foreign steel imports and the changes in pricing seen over the past 12 to 18 months. Mr. Plummer sent Steel Market Update a letter to the editor and we have included the vast majority of the content in the article below:
“China is not the sole problem facing the Domestic Steel Industry. In addition, when you consider that a large percentage of Chinese ships to the West Coast, there really is only a modest impact to the Midwest mills who are screaming the loudest.”
On another power point slide which was used during the ASD presentation, Mr. Plummer pointed out that there were 75 individual countries which exported steel to the United States during calendar year 2014. The top six countries (includes China at #6) accounted for 25.539 million tons or 63.5 percent of the total. As a country, China exported 91.3 million metric tons of steel last year. The U.S. accounted for 3.3 percent of total Chinese exports. So far in 2015, China is the 7th largest steel supplier to the United States.
