Published by:Mark Burgess<>
30 Apr 2025 @ 21:17 UTC

Steel hot-rolled coil prices in the Southern US slipped marginally lower for a third consecutive week in the assessment period to Wednesday April 30, with buying activity waning and forward-looking sentiment worsening, according to market sources.

Fastmarkets calculated its weeklysteel hot-rolled coil index, fob mill US South, at $46.00 per hundredweight ($920 per short ton) on April 30, down by 0.54% from $46.25 per cwt on April 23.
Inputs were collected in both the buyer and seller sub-indices in a range of $43.50-47.50 per cwt on Wednesday, representing offers and general market estimates.
Fastmarkets’ dailysteel hot-rolled coil index, fob mill US Midwest, was calculated at $46.75 per cwt on Wednesday, down by 2.77% from $48.08 per cwt a week earlier on April 23.
Steelmaker Nucor kept its consumer spot price (CSP) for hot-rolled products to a $46.50 per cwt ($930 per ton) base on April 28, unchanged from the previous week.
Market participants continued to describe a spot market slowdown in response to continuing economic uncertainty, caused in part by tariff confusion and the implications of steep duties on Chinese goods.
The market is dead quiet – you can emphasize ‘dead’, a distributor source said. Inquiries are non-existent, and anyone who calls is just price-checking.
The panic buying which occurred in February and March in advance of official tariff announcements has now basically turned into a waiting game.
We are not seeing any increases in forecasts from our larger customers, and the smaller guys bought steel for the second quarter in the first quarter, ahead of the increases, so we expect overall shipments to be down heading into the third quarter, the source said. Recent economic data won’t help the negative sentiment.
Whether market participants liked it or not, tariff uncertainty was still affecting the overall market.
As long as the on-again, off-again spat with the tariffs continues, everyone will hold back from making any big moves, the source said. The best thing the [US government] could do is to start hammering out stable trade deals to give the market some clarity on the rules. Until then, we will be at a standstill or, in the best case, a slow crawl.
While sources said that most of the bigger mills were keeping their offer prices at the upper end of the range, smaller mills were still willing and able to make deals at discounted prices.
I’m not very optimistic, the distributor source said. I do think that things will pick up for September/October production, as long as we have some clear rules and stability. If not, this could drag on.
Lead times have been reported at three to six weeks.