Steel Strip

The EU producers are currently facing low order intake as the flurry of activity in early September has tailed off now that distributors have restocked to appropriate levels. In many countries, prices have been lowered a little to encourage purchasing. Negotiations will start soon for first quarter 2010 business but no official announcements have been [...]

Tata Steel on Wednesday said its European subsidiary Corus will be able to meet full capacity utilisation by the end of the current fiscal, riding on revival in global demand.
Corus, which had cut production capacity of its mills by as much as 50 per cent amid the demand slump last year, has currently revived [...]

Your industry news article on a steel business briefing report:-
Steel Business Briefing warns that demand expectations in the steel industry could drop as low as they did in December 2008, at the height of the global financial meltdown. With the downward trend expected to continue at least into early 2010, this is bad news for [...]

With steel shipments from metals service centers slowly rising, inventories of the metal, in decline since early last year, rose slightly in the United States and Canada, the Metals Activity Report from the Metals Service Center Institute shows. Shipments of aluminum products also rose slightly, but inventories of the light metal continued to decline in [...]

We have argued for some time that recent price increases implemented by the steel producers were premature and counterproductive.
Shortages due to greatly reduced inventories which in themselves were the result of poor sales lead to end users and distributors placing new orders in June and July. It was naive in the extreme for the steel [...]

The Times online commenting on a report from the World Steel Association paints a more optimistic picture for the steel industry for 2010.
The long night is almost over for steelmaking, which will enjoy a strong recovery in 2010, the World Steel Association (WSA) predicted yesterday.
Exceptionally strong consumption in China means that demand for the steel [...]

German iron and steel production rose during September, suggesting demand was improving, but was still down sharply from a year earlier as the market remained weakened by the economic downturn.
German mills produced 3.5 million tons (3.17 million metric tons) of steel for the month, an 8 percent increase on the previous month. Year to date [...]

We have just heard that Corus are to increase strip mill prices by £30 to £50 dependant upon grade.
Increased demand due to customer destocking is given as the reason.
At a time when some grades are in short supply we have little doubt that they will succeed in implementing the increase. However at a time when [...]

We spotted the following report on netbusiness
THOUSANDS of workers at Redcar’s Teesside Cast Products site were boosted today by news that the steelmaker had secured orders to keep the plant operational until the end of October.
Since April, when the international consortium responsible for buying nearly 80% of the plant’s output abandoned a 10-year deal, [...]

Production at the Corus hot strip mill at Llanwern near Newport is to restart next month, the steel giant says.
It has been mothballed since January, but the company says there has been some growth in orders and it wants to satisfy this increasing demand.
However, the restart will not reverse any of the 528 job [...]