SMU Data and Models
August 22, 2017
Steel Buyer’s Basics: Coating Costs
Written by Mario Briccetti
Over the last few weeks, the price of zinc has risen to over $1.41 per pound on the London Metal Exchange, and I thought it was time for an update on a series of articles I’ve written on the actual metallic cost of coating steel with zinc.
To do the calculation, I use a spreadsheet I developed to calculate the impact of zinc and aluminum prices on galvanized and Galvalume coating costs. Below is a graph of coating costs for zinc on a range of coating weights and coil thicknesses (widths do not matter). Metal costs are based on the LME Zinc index with 7.5 cents added to that for the U.S. Midwest surcharge (which covers warehousing costs). These costs only include metal prices and do not include any labor, energy or other overhead costs.
