Nerds of Steel

US long products imports rose in January for the first time since June 2007, based on SIMA US import licenses. As you can see in the spreadsheet below, an increase in rebar and beam import licenses is driving the rebound. Rebar licenses almost tripled in Jan 08 compared to the Dec 07, but are still lower than average 2007 monthly actuals. Beam licenses, on the other hand, have reached their highest levels since December 2006, and February beam imports already look like they will be high based on licenses collected up to February 12th.

US import licenses for long products declined from 240,000 short tons in November ‘07 to 222,000 short tons in December, based on SIMA data.  This is the lowest level of long products import licenses since we began tracking them in April 07 when they were 358,000 short tons.  As you may have seen from earlier posts, SIMA import license data is a good indicator of actual import levels and is published before Department of Commerce  import data is available.  For more information on our collection of SIMA data, see our earlier posts “SIMA US long products import licenses for Sept, Oct, Nov 07″ and “Notes on SIMA licenses”.

EditGrid Spreadsheet by user/nerdsofsteel.

Below is Steel Import Monitoring and Analysis System (SIMA) data comparing US long products import licenses to actual imports for September and October 2007.  November licenses are also listed below, though actuals are not yet available because Department of Commerce actual import data is published 6 weeks after the end of each month.  The license  data is published weekly on Tuesdays on the SIMA website, and as you can see below, license data published about 2 weeks after the end of each month is a pretty good indicator of actual results.  All data below is in short tons.

EditGrid Spreadsheet by user/nerdsofsteel.

License data for the month listed is collected as of the date listed after each month (about 2 weeks after month-end)

Here’s a graphical version of the SIMA versus actual import data that Jessica posted. It includes only carbon/alloy finished long products. The data is shown in short tons. The SIMA license data comes from this website of the import administration. It’s published every Tuesday evening.

The analysis here is an attempt to exploit the early availability of the license data to estimate the imports for the recently completed month. This is necessary because the actual import data which comes from the Department of Commerce trails the month end by 6 weeks. There is a preliminary DOC estimate published about three weeks after month end, but acceptable license data is usually available before then and provides more detail than the DOC preliminary report. In the case of August for instance, the DOC preliminary estimate is of a 39% decline in all imports from the July level. The license data shown here indicate a 37% decline for this group of finished long products.

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