Michael Cowden

2 weeks ago | steelmarketupdate.com | Michael Cowden

President Donald Trump on Friday gave his blessing to a $14-billion “partnership” between Nippon Steel and U.S. Steel. Trump in a post on Truth Social claimed the agreement would “create at least 70,000 jobs,” add $14 billion to the US economy, and keep U.S. Steel’s headquarters in Pittsburgh. “The bulk of that Investment will occur in the next 14 months,” he said. The president credited his trade policies for the pact.

2 weeks ago | steelmarketupdate.com | Michael Cowden

Zekelman is known for his straight talk. And his company is one of the largest steel buyers in North America. So he’s got a better eye than most on steel market developments. We’ll talk about the positives and negatives of tariffs and what else the steel industry might like to see from the Trump administration. We’ll also talk about the latest capacity announcements and what it means for the market. Potential new projects tallying into billions have already been announced.

2 weeks ago | steelmarketupdate.com | Michael Cowden

Here is another point that underscores how things are off when it come to demand, this one from the coated side of the market. Remember the preliminary anti-dumping duties announced on imports coated flat-rolled steel on April 4? They were supposed to, well, galvanize galvanized prices. That’s not what we’ve seen to date. Instead, galvanized base prices have continued to slip since peaking in March. And that’s despite import volumes of both galvanized and ‘other’ coated products falling in April.

3 weeks ago | thefabricator.com | Michael Cowden

OEMs typically take downtime in June and July. It’s one of the reasons why you rarely see prices shoot higher in the early summer. (I sometimes wonder why mills do outages in the spring when their customers do them in the summer, but I digress.)Sure, mills might announce price hikes over the summer, but often it’s to try to slow any price declines. In recent years, prices have regularly peaked in April, slipped in the summer, and then recovered in the fall.

1 month ago | steelmarketupdate.com | Michael Cowden

There had been rumors that Cliffs would look to sell assets. And the company confirmed those rumors on Thursday after losing nearly $500 million in Q1 following a nearly $450 million lost in Q4. “Something that often comes up in moments like this is divestitures of non-core assets. And this is a very asset rich company,” said Cliffs CFO Celso Goncalves, who is also Lourenco’s son. “I’m not going to go into specifics of which ones.