US hot-rolled steel tags fall to summer lows

Oct 26, 2011 | 04:50 PM | Anne Riley

Tags  SteelBenchmarker, hot-rolled steel, cold-rolled coil, steel prices, heavy melt scrap, shredded scrap, busheling scrap, Anne Riley

NEW YORK — U.S. steel prices have returned to lows last logged at the height of the summer doldrums on the back of sluggish fourth-quarter demand and continued oversupply issues, according to industry indices and market sources.

"Once again, our inventories are getting hammered, getting devalued," one service center source told AMM, citing excess capacity and mill discounting as the cause of the slide. "I’ve become more and more convinced that anything short of widespread outages aren’t going to do a thing."

Hot-rolled band prices in the United States have slipped to $732 per tonne ($664 per net ton) f.o.b. mill, SteelBenchmarker said in an Oct. 24 report, released Wednesday. That’s down 2.5 percent from $751 per tonne ($681 per net ton) two weeks earlier and a return to lows reported at the end of August.

U.S. cold-rolled coil prices have also lost ground, sliding 1.5 percent to $839 per tonne ($761 per ton) f.o.b. mill from $852 per tonne ($773 per ton) previously, while standard plate tags have slipped 0.8 percent to $1,066 per tonne ($967 per ton) from $1,075 per tonne ($975 per ton), according to SteelBenchmarker.....