Steel Products Prices North America
January 7, 2018
Comparison Price Indices: Mild Price Movement Leading into Increases
Written by John Packard
During the middle of this past week, a number of the domestic mills, led by Nucor in the east and California Steel in the west, raised flat rolled steel prices. With steel buyers just returning from the extended Christmas and New Years holidays, we found price offers were up, but the actual placement of orders at the new prices was not being reported to Steel Market Update. We saw modest movement, mostly on cold rolled and coated steels.
Nucor raised plate prices by $50 per ton on Friday of last week. At the time of this writing, we are unaware of any other movement by plate producers, but expect there to be more announcements this week. We noticed that Platts has adjusted their index to reflect delivered Midwest pricing where their index had previously been FOB Southeastern domestic mill. We are unsure of our influence as we have been referencing plate prices as “delivered” since we began providing plate numbers to the marketplace.
