US Rebar Spot Market Buoyant as Price Increases Take Hold

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Price increases for rebar in the US market announced earlier this month of around $30 per ton are reported being accepted by the market, driving spot prices this week to a range of $920-$940/ton, FOB the mill for typical-size orders, according to market participants. Prices tend to be a touch higher in the Northeast US, sources said.

Overall supply is limited and there are several pockets of solid demand, especially from infrastructure. “There are really no import options, so the domestic mills have the pricing power,” one buyer told WSD.

“While manufacturing and residential construction is kind of soft,” a steel distributor said, “when you drill down there is a lot of construction activity in several areas.” He pointed specifically to power and utilities, telecommunications, healthcare, education and water/road projects. “And, of course, data center activity is the darling right now,” he added.

Data center building is by far the hot driver of demand—and not just for rebar. At a recent conference, Reliance CEO Karla Lewis pointed to a range of structural steels riding the data center construction wave, but which also needs more steel post-construction, on the inside. “Almost all of our companies are touching the actual data center, a lot of interior racking enclosures for servers,” she said, as an example.

Lewis noted that Reliance is also selling flat “hot-rolled steel and for big tanks that are going underground to hold diesel fuel, because the data centers need backup power.”

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