Posts tagged as:

forecast

US flat products imports climb 6% in February

March 10, 2010

Based on reported import licenses, US flat products imports increased 6% from 432,000 short tons in January to 456,000 tons in February. This can be compared to 548,000 tons of flat products imports in February 2009.
Hot rolled imports showed the highest import volume gain by rising 20,000 tons in February while cut [...]

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2010 GDP growth and steel demand forecast

February 12, 2010

The IMF recently released an updated forecast of global GDP growth for 2010.  As many of you know, I’m fond of using the historical relationship between GDP and steel demand to forecast steel demand growth.  In fact, last year about this time I provided a forecast of 2009 global steel demand using the latest available [...]

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US flat products imports rise 2% in January

February 11, 2010

Based on reported import licenses, US flat products imports increased 2% from 405,000 short tons in December to 412,000 tons in January. This can be compared to 532,000 tons of flat products imports in January 2009.
Hot dip galvanized imports showed the largest gains rising by 16% followed by hot rolled imports which [...]

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US demand forecast – 2010 and beyond

February 3, 2010

Last week I spoke at the AMM State of Steel Conference in Florida.  Although I was on a construction panel, I was asked to provide a forecast of 2010 steel demand for the US.   As many of you know, we believe the main drivers of steel demand in the US are the NAFTA vehicle build [...]

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World Steel Production for March, 2009 & Short Term Demand Forecast

April 27, 2009

The World Steel Association recently published two important sets of data. The first, published about a week ago are the latest figures for crude steel production by country through March of 2009. You can see and use that data in the Nerds spreadsheet below. In aggregate it shows an 8.3% improvement in global output March [...]

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European steel production and demand forecast 2009

February 6, 2009

We’re not a forecasting firm, we’re strategy consultants. But lately macroeconomic developments are at the forefront of everyone’s mind, for obvious reasons. So we’ve endeavored to keep you abreast of the latest forecasts and what they might mean for steel production and demand.  In this vein, I received the following question yesterday from one [...]

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2009 GDP forecasts and steel demand growth

February 2, 2009

The International Monetary Fund recently updated its global GDP growth forecast for 2009 and 2010.  Not surprisingly, the growth projections were revised downward.   So I thought I’d take the opportunity to update the graph showing the relationship between global GDP and steel demand and to refine the comments I made in a recent post using [...]

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“The sky is falling, should we run for it?”

January 23, 2009

On January 21, I appeared on a steel outlook panel at the inaugural AMM State of Steel conference in NY.  My presentation, “The sky is falling, should we run for it,” appears below.  The main point I made was that while 2009 will be a very difficult year, we should not be surprised that steel [...]

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