Steel Products Prices North America

April 20, 2017
Foreign Steel Imports: SMU Opinion - Items at Risk
Written by John Packard
The U.S. Department of Commerce released the latest update on foreign steel import license request on Tuesday evening. The data suggest that April will be similar to that of March where license data is at 3.5 million net tons. Both March and the April trend a well above both the 12 month and 3 month moving averages and have to be quite disturbing to the domestic steel industry.
We pointed out in recent articles on this subject that the domestic steel mills continue to be the largest importers of record. Semi-finished steels (slabs, billets) saw licenses above 800,000 tons in March (12-month moving average is 587,539 tons) and we are trending toward another big month in April based on the license data through the 18th of the month.


