Nerds of Steel

US long products imports will continue to decline in March. Long products import licenses continued their decline to 257,000 short tons in March, compared to February import actuals of 330,000 tons and January actuals of 385,000 tons. Rebar licenses led this decline with March import licenses at 77,000 tons compared to February actuals of 119,000 tons. Parallel Flange Sections imports appear to be returning to lower levels achieved in early 2007 with March licenses at 27,000 tons compared to February’s actuals of 69,000 tons.

Below is a presentation I made at Steel Business Briefing’s North American steel conference held in Chicago March 2008. The topic of my panel was “American Steel: Land of Opportunity”. My presentation deals with the recent acquisition of steel assets in North America by companies headquartered outside the region and argues that the North American steel industry is stronger because of the involvement of global consolidators. The presentation also argues that the restructured North American steel industry is a model for other regions, all of which are or will eventually experience a similar restructuring of ownership and thereby bring about a more sustainable global industry structure.

Below is a presentation I made recently at the SMA Board of Directors meeting in Florida. It deals with the issue of organizational size in today’s steel industry and asks some questions (more than providing any answers) about how the structure of steel organizations will change as they deal with much different dimensions of scale and scope. It also contains some provocative “Zipfian” statistical analysis of industry structure that raises questions as to how consolidation might proceed both in the US and globally.

In the end, there is no argument for or against big or small organizations here. Mittal after all was producing less than 500KT 20 years ago. But in the future, our industry will be populated by much larger organizations than it is today. Organizational innovation is going to be vital to the strategic health of any company of any size that wants to remain successful and independent. Click on the presentation’s ‘Menu’ button (lower right) to see a larger view.

This link will take you to the Ohio EPA page for New Steel International, the working title of MMK’s proposed steel mill investment in Haverhill or Franklin, OH. Deep in the detail you will see estimates of the facility size. It’s not clear exactly how big the facility will be. The plan is to build the finishing end first (cold rolling capacity of 6,000 tons/day) followed by the meltshop (casting capacity of 12,000 tons/day). New Steel International is the name of the consulting company which filed the application on MMK’s behalf.

It sounds like the 1.5MT for the plant refers only to the finishing end. If the front end gets built it will be substantially larger. Comments relating to the Sun Coke Energy coke plant nearby seem to refer to the fact that the plant intends some form of iron making facility in addition to steel production. Anyone with any more info, please sign in and add below.

For those of you who are following US long products imports, December actual import figures have now been published, and are almost 30,000 short tons less than November imports, confirming low import licenses collected for the month. You can view the updated data from my earlier post related to January import licenses.