OEMs typically take downtime in June and July. It’s one of the reasons why you rarely see prices shoot higher in the early summer. (I sometimes wonder why mills do outages in the spring when their customers do them in the summer, but I digress.)
Sure, mills might announce price hikes over the summer, but often it’s to try to slow any price declines.
In recent years, prices have regularly peaked in April, slipped in the summer, and then recovered in the fall. (Let’s forget last year, which was a little unusual. There was no recovery in the fall—just one very long bottom and no recovery until winter—but you get the picture.)
Generally speaking, we’ve seen sheet prices rise in the summer only if there has been an external shock, such as the surprise imposition of Section 232 tariffs on Canada and Mexico in 2018 or the unexpected rebound in demand throughout 2021 following a pandemic-stricken 2020. We saw prices rise through the summer in both years.
