Steel Products Prices North America
December 10, 2015
Steel Buyers Supportive of the Flat Rolled Steel Price Announcements
Written by John Packard
The rumblings of a price increase have been building for a couple of weeks now as mills like SDI (Butler) and Nucor (Berkeley) have been quietly asking for higher steel prices from their customers prior to any announcements being made.
On Tuesday we traded emails with a service center executive who told us, “While rumblings of an increase persist, none has been bold enough to take that next step yet. Some have quietly increased prices on coated and to a lesser extent cold rolled. On hot rolled it is more of a line in the sand on lowering prices further. The fundamentals are starting to change and move in a positive direction.
Inventories have dropped modestly, and hopefully will continue to drop. Scrap has apparently hit bottom and has turned upwards in a few cases. Foreign offers and imports looking forward are moderating. Domestic capacity utilization and planned outages will further constrain supply. Early reports on future consumption are stable to mildly improving. Why wouldn’t prices turn and start to head back up?”
