Last Wednesday, NLMK announced a $40 price hike. Since then, every other domestic steel mill followed with their respective price increase announcement. AK steel’s announcement was for a move to $420/st.November MSCI data announced Monday, December 14th showed a 15% drop in shipments to 1.874m tons or 937,000 t/d. On the bright side, inventories dropped 256,000 tons or 4.4% to 5,575m tons. A drop in imported tons coupled with the lowest domestic capacity utilization since the doldrums of 2008 and 2001 explains both of these data points. Unfortunately, the months-on-hand jumped to 2.98, up 10.4% MoM due to the sharp drop in demand, which is expected due to tax implications of holding steel at year end.