The steel industry continues to struggle as was recently evidenced by ArcelorMittal’s shuttering of a South Carolina wire rod mill where 226 people had worked and U.S. Steel’s layoffs of 285 more workers at Gary Works over the last few weeks.But shipments are improving, and exports are also up slightly.
U.S. steel mills shipped 7.2 million net tons of steel in March, a 5 percent increase over the previous month, according to the American Iron and Steel Institute. Cold-rolled sheets and hot-rolled sheets — both big products at Northwest Indiana’s mills — were up 10 percent and 5 percent, respectively.
Shipments, or steel the mills have actually sold, were still down 12.8 percent in March as compared to the previous year. The demand for steel has been growing but imports have captured a record third of the U.S. market share this year, which industry leaders have blamed for wave after wave of plant idlings and layoffs.
So far in 2015, U.S. mills have shipped 21.9 net tons, or about 7.9 percent less than during the same period in 2014. They exported 896,027 net tons in March, the American Institute for International Steel estimates.
Exports, or shipments that steel mills send abroad, were 2 percent higher in March than in February, but they were still down about 13.8 percent as compared to March 2014.
Much of the gain came from trading partners within North America. Exports to Canada increased 4.2 percent in March, while exports to Mexico rose 2.9 percent, or about 4.9 percent more than the previous March.
China imported about 10,644 net tons of American-made steel, a tiny fraction of what Canada and Mexico bought from U.S. mills but a 45.5 increase over February.
Gains were offset however by a 36 percent plunge in exports to Europe, the AIIS estimates. Over the first three months of the year, steel exports are down 7.1 percent, due largely to a 16.6 percent decline in exports to Canada.
“The drop in exports from 2014 to 2015 is unsurprising, given that the U.S. dollar is significantly stronger now than it was a year ago,” the American Institute for International Steel said in a statement. “The pickup in exports from February to March, meanwhile, may simply be a function especially in the case of Canada of getting past the coldest and snowiest part of the year.
An expensive dollar, combined with stagnant or weak economic activity in much of the world, appears to leave little room for optimism on the part of exporters for the rest of 2015.”
