In April, the largest finished steel import permit applications for offshore countries were for Korea (168,000 nt, up 54 percent from March), Japan (91,000 nt, down 33 percent), Turkey (87,000 nt, up 77 percent), Germany (81,000 nt, down 2 percent) and China (56,000 nt, down 3 percent).
Finished steel import permits for major product categories that registered significant increases in April versus the March preliminary include sheet and strip all other metallic coated (up 91 percent), reinforcing bar (up 97 percent), heavy structural shapes (up 77 percent), line pipe (up 25 percent), plates in coils (up 19 percent), and cut length plates (up 18 percent).
"Our primary concern regarding steel imports is the fact that with domestic capacity utilization still lagging below 75 percent, we nevertheless see imports claiming 20 percent of market share," Thomas J. Gibson, AISI president and CEO, said, commenting on the April SIMA data. "We continue to monitor very closely the import numbers and urge our government to be vigilant regarding any surges of unfairly traded steel into the US market."