Our contacts don’t see any mechanism or development, at the present time, that will stop the current “run” of steel prices in USA. Steel service center inventories were down again in January 2008 and offshore deliveries hit new recent lows in January based upon preliminary data.

The Market is being sustained in part by blast furnace outages at Severstal North America and Arcelor Mittal’s Cleveland plant. Moreover, the USA mills now have the opportunity to export their surplus.