Steel Products Prices North America
March 9, 2017
Flat, Long, and Semi-Finished Imports through February 2017
Written by Peter Wright
Licensed data for February was reported by the Steel Import Monitoring System of the US Commerce Department on March 7th. An explanation of the methodology that we at SMU use to analyze the trade data is given at the end of this piece. All volumes in this analysis are reported in short tons. Total rolled product licensed imports in the single month of February were 1,990,476 tons with a three month moving average (3MMA) of 2,098,296 tons. 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 because this presents a more representative picture.
Figure 1 shows the 3MMA through February licensed tons of semi-finished, flat and long products since January 2004.
