Final Thoughts

I took our coated numbers down pretty hard this week. I had been collecting lower numbers over the past few weeks. However, they would pop up sporadically. Come and go for no reason other than a mill decided that the order was too good to pass up, that it fit a hole or that at the kind of margins the mills are making it was just too hard to walk away.

I discussed this with the head of commercial for one domestic mill and he was candid when I asked about finding $40.00/cwt base prices in the marketplace. “Coated has eroded a bit more, but Galvalume is above that,” he said. “Look, the special deal pricing/import fighter has been under $40 for eight weeks already…. So, it’s not surprising if some of that seeps into ‘regular’ business at the base price. Having said that, it seems we are not seeing the same level of price cutting that was going on 15 or 30 days ago. Perhaps the day-in day-out small tonnage price is eroding, but the big ton price is staying fairly stable.”