38 / 64
Wire & Cable ASIA – May/June 2011
36
From the
americas
And it would point up the strengthening Chinese
connection with Latin America, whose exports to China
rose to $41.3 billion between 2000 and 2009. China is
Colombia’s second-largest trading partner after the US,
with bilateral trade rising from $10 million in 1980 to more
than $5 billion in 2010.
Steel
❖
American steel makers expected higher earnings in the
first quarter after the soft steel market and seasonal
slowdowns in production that hurt them during the
fourth quarter of 2010. In a conference call reported by
McClatchy-Tribune Information Services (20
th
February),
the CEO and chairman of US Steel Corp (Pittsburgh)
said that higher average realised prices, shipments,
and production volumes should lead to better earnings
results.
“Order rates for most customer groups and publicly
reported spot market prices began to increase later in the
fourth quarter,” John Surma said. “We remain cautiously
optimistic that global economic conditions will continue
to improve in the first quarter.”
In the week ended 12
th
February, the last for which
Mr Surma would have had data, the American Iron and
Steel Institute reported that domestic steel mills operated
at 74.8% capacity, up from 73% capacity during the
previous week.
❖
AK Steel (West Chester, Ohio), a producer of carbon,
stainless, and electrical steels, said it has raised its prices
for all carbon flat-rolled steel products by $50 per ton.
❖
Showa Denko Carbon Inc, which produces graphite
electrodes for electric arc furnace (EAF) steel making,
intends to expand capacity and add 100 jobs at its plant
in Ridgeville, South Carolina. As reported by Ashley
Fletcher Frampton in the Charleston Business Journal
(9
th
February), the company — a unit of the Tokyo-based
chemical engineering group Showa Denka KK — plans
an investment “in the hundreds of millions of dollars” to
increase local production by 68 per cent.
Robert Whitten, president and CEO of Showa Denka
Carbon, told the Journal that construction to alter the
facility is expected to begin later this year and should be
complete by the first half of 2013. Mr Whitten said that
the company had given serious consideration to building
a second plant in China. The decision to overhaul the
American plant instead was influenced, he said, by the
availability of raw materials, reliable and competitively
priced energy, access to the Port of Charleston,
and strong demand for the company’s products from
EAF steel makers (“minimills”) in the United States.
❖
The US said on 11
th
February that it would pursue a
World Trade Organization case that challenges Chinese
antidumping duties on imports of American steel.
In 2009, China imposed extra duties of up to 64.8% on
imports from the US of “grain-oriented flat-rolled electrical
steel” used in the production of industrial machinery.
In its complaint to the WTO, the US charged that China
“improperly used investigative procedures.” The decision
to press the claim suggests that the Obama administration
is responding to the urging of domestic steel makers for a
proactive trade policy with China.
The US trade deficit with China continues to grow. The most
recent data from the Department of Commerce put it at
$252.4 billion for the first 11 months of 2010, compared with
$208.7 billion in the first 11 months of 2009.
The US has also filed WTO cases against China over limits on
subsidies and exports of raw materials.
Notes and asides . . .
❖
Theft of scrap metal in the US is becoming more common
and – to judge from a recent episode in the Pittsburgh
metro area – increasingly brazen. On 1
st
March, the
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
reported that Pennsylvania
state police were investigating a weekend break-in at a
Uniontown scrap yard. The burglars cut through a steel
siding and took about 5,000 pounds of scrap copper,
using the company’s equipment to load it onto a company-
owned pickup.
“We’ve had some thefts, but nothing like this before,” an
employee of the firm told the newspaper. “I’d like to catch
the person before police get hold of him. They even used
our tow motor to lift two four-by-four skids [of copper
scrap] into the truck.”
The value of the stolen truck and its load was estimated
at $21,350.
Automotive
Will a homely but worthy electric vehicle
be the first Chinese-made car actually to
materialise in US dealer showrooms?
In the view of Bradley Berman, the HybridCars.com editor
who writes for a number of US publications, a compact
sedan from the Chinese company BYD Autos could make
its mark in the American market. The car maker, whose
name derives from Build Your Dream, has set up preliminary
North American operations in the Los Angeles suburb of
Glendale. Mr Berman took the opportunity for a test drive
in BYD’s plug-in hybrid and delivered an early judgment: the
F3DM will never turn heads on California freeways; even so,
it may well be a contender.
Assuming that regulatory requirements are met and federal
safety certifications obtained, the F3DM may be the
frontrunner in the race to become the first car from a Chinese
auto maker to arrive in US showrooms. According to BYD,
that could happen by spring 2012.
The test car was a production model, visiting California on a
research exemption. According to company officials, “close
to 10,000” of the F3DM models have been sold in the home
market. After Mr Berman’s day with the “impressive though
imperfect” import, he decided that Chinese cars – electric