Steel Products Prices North America
April 13, 2017
First Look at April Steel Imports
Written by John Packard
Around the middle of the month Steel Market Update (SMU) will analyze the US Department of Commerce Steel Import Monitoring & Analysis (SIMA) system to see how foreign steel imports are tracking and project total imports for the month based on the mid-month daily average. What we have been tracking is a very high number of steel import licenses both in March and now again in April. We anticipate both months will end up well over 3 million net tons of imports, well above both the 12-month and 3-month moving averages.
As we mentioned in our last article on this subject, the biggest single import item continues to be semi-finished steels with the vast majority of the tons being slabs (with a small number of billets). Both slabs and billets are used in the production of steel and are purchased by the domestic steel mills.
