Bits 'N Pieces

Supply is the over-riding issue affecting steel buyers today. Supply is constrained for a number of reasons, some expected and some by chance.

We wrote an article earlier this week about two situations affecting steel buyers in the United States. The accident at CSN in Brazil took out their lone blast furnace costing them about 200-250,000 metric tons of pig iron production. The net result of the CSN accident is affecting tens of thousands of tons of export orders (mostly corrosion resistant steels) to customers in the United States. Then over the weekend North Star BlueScope suffered an explosion and breakout of one of their electric arc furnaces. The company is expecting a loss of approximately 38,500 net tons (35,000 metric tons) of hot rolled production that cannot be made up due to the mill being at capacity at the time of the accident.