Steel Products Prices North America
January 7, 2016
Flat, Long, and Semi-Finished Steel Imports Analysis
Written by Peter Wright
Licensed data for December was reported by the Steel Import Monitoring System of the US Commerce Department on January 5th. At SMU we perform a detailed analysis of this data, an explanation of our methodology is given at the end of this write up. Total rolled product licensed imports in the single month of December were 1,955,625 short tons, up by 6.1 percent from the preliminary November volume. We prefer not to dwell on single months results because of the extreme variability that can occur in individual products. In the comments below we use three month moving averages (3MMA) to get a more representative picture. The 3MMA through December was 1,996,248 tons, down by 3.1 percent from the 3MMA through November. On the same basis flat rolled was down by 2.8 percent, long products up by 4.5 percent and pipe and tube down by 11.3 percent.
Figure 1 shows the 3MMA through December licenses for semi-finished, flat and long products.
