Posted on 30 Apr 2019
The US sheet spread appears to have been blown wide-open late last week, though market sources are puzzled as to exactly why.
Kallanish set its hot-rolled range Monday at $660-740/short ton, with cold-rolled at $760-840/st. All prices are ex-works, domestic mill.
The spread can be characterised generally as mini-mills near the bottom and integrated mills near the top, though prices across the board appear to be weakening.
One Midwest buyer says $700/st is the highest hot-rolled number in his local market. A second puts the general hot-rolled range at $660-680/st.
“Service centres don’t want to buy as they know the price is weak,” he says.
A source at one integrated mill maintains that he is still selling some hot-rolled at $740/st, but concedes prices have fallen all along the line.
“A super-wide range has developed on both products, and I honestly do not understand why,” he says. “We are holding the lines at the upper end.”
He adds that at least one mini-mill is selling hot-rolled for as low as $600/st out of one of its mills, and he is “...completely befuddled as to why.”
The market itself appears to have decent fundamentals and several planned outages are slated for the summer, so the weakness is further indecipherable, he says.
