Steel Products Prices North America
April 11, 2019
Foreign Steel Traders Lament
Written by John Packard
It took a couple of years, dozens of trade suits, a Section 301 investigation, Changes to the Country of Origin, the Section 232 tariffs and finally a pull-back in domestic pricing to dramatically reduce the amount of foreign steel tonnage coming into the U.S. market. This reduction will not be short-lived. It will continue for many months, according to the traders Steel Market Update spoke with earlier today.
A large international trading company executive told SMU, “Importer’s business today is pretty challenging…the spreads [between domestic and foreign steel pricing] are not sufficient as foreign prices are marginal or at a premium to domestic.” This same executive confirmed their order book was down over the past 4 to 6 weeks.
