Steel Products Prices North America
April 9, 2017
Flat, Long, and Semi-Finished Imports through March 2017
Written by Peter Wright
Licensed data for March was reported by the Steel Import Monitoring System of the US Commerce Department on March 4th. 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. The total volume of carbon and alloy products were up sharply to the highest level since May 2015 but this increase was mainly due to the volume of semi-finished. Total rolled product licensed imports in the single month of March were 2,377,479 tons with a three month moving average (3MMA) of 2,204,565 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 March licensed tons of semi-finished, flat and long products since January 2004.
