Steel Products Prices North America
June 12, 2017
Flat, Long, Semi-finished Imports through May
Written by Peter Wright
The final license data for May was reported by the Steel Import Monitoring and Analysis system of the U.S. Commerce Department on June 6. An explanation of the methodology that SMU uses 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 rose again in May to the highest level since July 2015. Flat rolled products declined slightly, but semis and longs both increased. Total rolled product licensed imports in the single month of May were 2,489,831 tons with a three-month moving average (3MMA) of 2,454,009 tons. We prefer not to dwell on single-month results because of the extreme variability that can occur in individual products. In the comments below, we use three-month moving averages because this presents a more representative picture.
