In the early part of last week, US Steel announced a $1.25 cwt. ($28/mt or $25/nt) base pricing price increase on all new flat-rolled spot orders effective immediately, and many questioned whether other US domestic flats mills would follow suit. Up until two weeks ago, spot prices had been experiencing a slow erosion across the board (although the bottom range for US domestic hot rolled coil prices are only down about $1.00 cwt. ($22/mt or $20/nt) from levels seen during the first week of May).
But as the long holiday weekend approached, other US mills had not rolled out increases, keeping week-on-week spot price transaction ranges on par with the previous week at $32.00-$33.50 cwt. ($705-$739/mt or $640-$670/nt) ex-Midwest mill. Some believe the US Steel announcement came for two reasons: one, their bookings have been decent and two, they don't do a lot of spot business, so they may have "tossed the increase against the wall to just to see if it would stick." Import futures prices from Mexico and Russia also remained steady since our last report a week ago, although activity last week was light due to holiday.