Steel Products Prices North America
March 11, 2016
Flat, Long, and Semi-Finished Imports through February 2016
Written by Peter Wright
Licensed data for February was reported by the Steel Import Monitoring System of the US Commerce Department on March 8th. 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 February were 1,856,999 short tons down by 13.2 percent from the final January 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 only three month moving averages (3MMA) to get a more representative picture. The 3MMA through February was 1,982,370 tons, down by 0.3 percent from the 3MMA through January. On the same basis flat rolled was down by 1.4 percent, long products was up by 1.8 percent and pipe and tube up by 1.0 percent.
