OTCMKTS:TORZ | Pre Galvanized Steel Tube

31 – Federal privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien announced he was investigating Statistics Canada’s request for private banking information on 500,000 Canadians. Therrien said numerous people had complained about the agency’s effort to gather detailed information on transactions held by Canadian financial institutions.

Insteel Industries, Inc., together with its subsidiaries, manufactures and markets steel wire reinforcing products for concrete construction applications. The company offers pre-stressed concrete strand (PC strand) and welded wire reinforcement (WWR) products. Its PC strand is a seven-wire strand that is used to impart compression forces into precast concrete elements and structures providing reinforcement for bridges, parking decks, buildings, and other concrete structures. The company's WWR engineered reinforcing product is used in nonresidential and residential construction. It produces a range of WWR products, such as engineered structural mesh, an engineered made-to-order product that is used as the primary reinforcement for concrete elements or structures serving as a reinforcing solution for hot-rolled rebar; concrete pipe reinforcement, an engineered made-to-order product that is used as the primary reinforcement in concrete pipe, box culverts, and precast manholes for drainage and sewage systems, water treatment facilities, and other related applications; and standard welded wire reinforcement, a secondary reinforcing product for crack control applications in residential and light nonresidential construction, including driveways, sidewalks, and various slab-on-grade applications. The company sells its products through sales representatives to the manufacturers of concrete products, distributors, rebar fabricators, and contractors primarily in the United States, as well as in Canada, Mexico, and Central and South America. Insteel Industries, Inc. was founded in 1953 and is headquartered in Mount Airy, North Carolina.

Vincent (Vinny) Welch is the managing director of TechnipFMC’s Boston office (One Financial Center, Boston, MA, 02111; Email: vincent.welch@technipfmc.com). He is responsible for managing engineering, development, licensing and research efforts. With over 35 years of experience, he has spent most of his career licensing and developing process technology for the petrochemical industry. He holds a B.S.Ch.E. degree from Northeastern University.

Evidence is now emerging that the Trump steel tariffs are beginning to have the desired effect of re-energizing shut-down steel mills and rolling lines, putting American steelworkers back to work, and displacing imports.  It also seems to be doing that without a particularly heavy burden on steel consumers, although the final appraisal of that aspect of steelmaking and steel tariffs is not complete.  This result is unsettling to the “free traders,” mostly because of thinking of political orthodoxy, but again I point out that the USA has not had, if it ever had, “free trade” in basic metals, mostly because there are no comparative advantages.  Instead, offshore (non-US) producers have long held an “absolute advantage,” in that offshore production costs have been lower than US costs in dollar terms, and in an effort to dispose of the chronic over-production of steel (due to large over-capacity),  offshore producers have been dumping their excess into the US market.      To illustrate, I invite readers to ponder the situation now unfolding in Lorain, Ohio.  Lorain has been a US steel-producing location since about 1880; it sits on the South Shore of Lake Erie, near Cleveland.  There are two steel plants in Lorain: the basic steel smelters of Republic Steel, and a processing re-melt and rolling mill operation of U.S. Steel. Both had some or all of their plant shut down in 2017, due to being undercut by dumped imported steel.       The Republic mill manufactured tubed product, basically forms of pipe, and rod product, including quite thin rod.  That sort of steel is used in such items as chicken-coop fencing, industrial fencing, and playground fencing. Tubing can be both thin-wall and thick-wall, and used in such final products as hydraulic lines, and pipe.  Now the Republic plant had shut down several pipe extruding and rolling lines; with the commencement of the tariffs, Republic is starting up those lines and calling back another thousand men.  Previous employment was down to about 660 men, so this is a significant boost in local employment.       The US Steel plant appears to be a rolling and finishing plant for both hot-rolled and cold-rolled products.  I do not have a full picture of the product lines, but given the historical location (near both shipbuilding and rail locomotive manufacture) I would guess it would include plate steel, boiler steel, structural.  That plant also will re-start rolling lines, probably adding many hundreds if not a thousand men.     The impact on Lorain is huge.  Lorain is a city gripped in poverty, with a poverty rate now at some 27% of the population.  Putting several thousand men back to work at steelmaking wages  (these are United Steelworkers Union jobs) dramatically changes that picture.  It also changes the dynamics of the local taxes and payments, putting City Hall on a more solid foundation, able to pay the policemen and the firemen.  So all of that is quite positive.     Who is taking the hit?  I don’t know, but I would assume the company taking the biggest hit is Acelar-Mittal, a dominant steel player headquartered in India.  The dumped product, I speculate, is flowing from Acelor mills in France, the Ruhr, India, and possibly Luxembourg.  I don’t know if any of the displaced product came from the other side of Lake Erie, in Ontario Canada, and probably does not, although the US-owned US Steel Canada might have produced some competing product.  How much tube steel was coming out of China is something the industry insiders would have a handle on, not me.  But in any event, it does choke off the dumped steel, and obliges domestic buyers to switch to US product, which they are now doing.  Bottom line:  Trump’s steel tariff gambit is working.  Now:  is it really hurting steel users?  Stay tuned for a later installment in this saga.   

15 – Canada’s Mikael Kingsbury skied to his second victory in as many competitions at the single moguls World Cup event in Thaiwoo, China. After winning the moguls event the previous weekend in Ruka, Finland – the first competition of the FIS World Cup season – Kingsbury took the gold medal in China with a final-run score of 90.31, beating Japan’s Ikuma Horishima (87.68) and Kazakhstan’s Dmitriy Reikherd (86.92).

Shares of VLPNY can be purchased through any online brokerage account. Popular online brokerages with access to the U.S. stock market include Vanguard Brokerage Services, TD Ameritrade, E*TRADE, Scottrade, Fidelity and Charles Schwab.

There's no question that Nucor is expanding its business. But frankly, the steel giant is always expanding its business -- in both good markets and bad ones. The real issue is how it is expanding and why. The process today, as it has been historically, is deliberate and strategically motivated, and the end goal is always to hit at least one of several key targets: lower operating costs, enhance or create a leading market position, move products up the value chain, and expand into new market niches. As long as Nucor keeps hitting those targets, it will support the company's long-term position as an industry leader and reward investors along the way: The company expects to post record earnings in 2018.   

Samchai Steel Industries Public Company Limited makes and sells steel pipes and tubes to the construction and furniture industries in Thailand and internationally. The company has market cap of $491.21 million. The firm provides structural steel pipes, galvanized steel pipes, furniture pipes, and hot rolled steel plates and sheets under the SAMCHAI trademark. It currently has negative earnings. Samchai Steel Industries Public Company Limited also offers car repairing services.

Part of the reason for continuing demand for expensive goods is that those goods are complex, and thus require a high level of integrated skill to produce.  For example, take the conundrum of massive cruise ships, the stuff of Costa Concordia size, now being built at 140,000 tons, a floating city of 5,000 guests and another 2,500 staff.  These monsters are invariably built up an obscure North German River, the Ems, at the town of Papenburg, at the Meyer Werft shipyard, which has been around in the Meyer family since 1795  (the current CEO is Jan Meyer, no surprise).  Here in this tiny town you have this monster shipyard with 3,300 men building the world's cruise ships.  German (and danish) shipwrights will earn easily the equivalent of $50,000/year each; the men in yards in Romania are paid $2,500./year, and in say Poland perhaps $4,000./year.  So the logical approach you would think would be to build the hull (if not the entire ship) in Romania, then tow it up to Germany or Denmark and do the outfitting there. 

22 – The union representing 50,000 Canada Post employees began rotating strikes after failing to reach a new contract agreement with the Crown Corporation. Small businesses called for a speedy end to the walkouts – saying a prolonged job action could chew into their profits ahead of the busy holiday shopping season.

6 – A Dallas police officer shot and killed a 26-year-old man in his own apartment. Amber Guyger said she mistook his apartment for her own home and believed he was a burglar. Guyger was charged three days later with manslaughter and was fired on Sept. 24.

Every three years the city also does mandated testing for lead by getting water samples from 30 homes that have the old pipes.