Steel Products Prices North America
May 10, 2017
Flat, Long, and Semi-Finished Imports through April 2017
Written by Peter Wright
The latest license data was reported by the Steel Import Monitoring and Analysis system of the US Commerce Department on May 2nd and closed out the April data. 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 was up again in April to the highest level since May 2015. Flat rolled products were down but semis and longs both increased. Total rolled product licensed imports in the single month of April were 2,582,945 tons with a three month moving average (3MMA) of 2,340,634 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 April licensed tons of semi-finished, flat and long products since January 2004.
