Final Thoughts

I received numerous notes regarding a hot strip mill outage at AMNS Calvert, which began last week. Based on reports from steel buyers, the HSM outage was expected to last for about one week. We asked ArcelorMittal for information and confirmation yesterday, but they failed to respond. Today, we received information that the Calvert lead times have moved out, partially because of the outage and partially because of strong demand in “auto and energy….” Not quite sure what to believe. The lead times on hot rolled and HRPO are now longer than those for cold rolled and coated at the week of Nov. 24 vs. Nov. 3 on cold rolled and Nov. 17 on coated.

Since Calvert is a slab conversion mill, we looked at another converter to see if their lead times reflected similar moves, potentially indicating a tightening of the market. We looked at NLMK lead times for Farrell and hot rolled was being quoted as the week of Oct. 14 and HRPO the week of Oct. 21. Cold rolled fully processed was the week of Nov. 11, while galvanized was the week of Nov. 4.