Final Thoughts

There have been a number of master sheets showing projected steel mill maintenance outages for the last couple weeks of September through the end of this calendar year. Steel Market Update (SMU) is following through with our mill sources, as well as steel buyers, to see if we can confirm the outages and if there is any need for buyers to be concerned about receiving their orders as promised. The initial projection has close to one million tons of production being impacted.

From my perspective and experience, I do not see any need for alarm based on what I have seen so far. Most of the flat rolled mills are taking short outages on their rolling equipment (hot strip mill, cold mill, coating lines), which is normal for this time of year. I am not yet sharing the list as I have reached out to a number of the steel mills to see if they will confirm (or correct) what we have seen from steel buyers. We did get a couple of responses prior to going to publication, but there were still a couple left that I wanted to confirm if possible. I will share a flat rolled maintenance list with our readers on Thursday.