Steel Products Prices North America
November 24, 2015
SMU Price Ranges & Indices: Reaching for the Bottom?
Written by John Packard
All eyes are looking ahead to after the Thanksgiving Holidays. As lead times approach the New Year (for hot rolled coil, most coated products are already well into 1st Quarter 2016) and customers think of restocking/preparing for 2016 business levels, this tends to be prime time for the domestic mills to announce price increases. To make matters more interesting we have US Steel confirming today that they will idle the Granite City Works plant after idling most of the Fairfield Works facility recently. At the same time AK Steel is idling Ashland.
The general manager of one of the larger service centers told SMU in an email this evening, “I think we’ll see impacts after the Thanksgiving holiday with buyers moving to place orders elsewhere, which should put floor on pricing.”
