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Article Excerpt
Editor's note: This article is an edited transcript of remarks by Peter E Marcus and Karlis M. Kirsis, managing partners of World Steel Dynamics, who spoke at last month's Steel Success Strategies conference in New York.
Since mid-2003, the steel market has been witness to frequent, unexpected, often amazing and sometimes violent surprises. The managing partners of World Steel Dynamics ranked the five biggest surprises, and assessed the consequences to steel suppliers around the globe.
* Surprise #1: The period of declining hot-rolled band prices ended in June 2003, sooner and with a shallower bottom than expected, avoiding a pricing death spiral. A few months later, steel raw material prices started to soar. Then, in fall 2003, world steel export prices took off.
What's the consequence? In early 2003, the global steel industry entered an age of discontinuity. Since then, the pattern of events has been inconsistent with those of the prior years. In mid-2003, the industry entered an age of steelmakers' metallics, which culminated in 2004 with extraordinary increases in steel prices and in early 2005 with a massive increase in iron ore and coking coal prices.
* Surprise #2: Hot-rolled band prices have collapsed [in recent months].
It's truly a surprise to see how quickly...
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