Stamping Out a Living

The Motley Fool via Yahoo! News According to a report in this morning's Wall Street Journal, the long-awaited reversal in the cyclical steel industry may have finally arrived. As Foolish readers are by now well aware, much of the cause of this and last years' run-up in steel prices has originated outside U.S. shores -- notably in China, whose roaring economy has been sucking up raw materials such as steel, oil, and coal like mad.
But with the commanders of China's command economy declaring that it's time to take the People's Republican Foot off the economic gas pedal, that demand for raw materials is starting to temper in the land of the Great Wall. And with it, the deficit of raw materials and the shipping needed to transport them worldwide.
Result: The acceleration of Chinese demand for steel has dropped fivefold in the second half of this year, in comparison with 2002, 2003, and early 2004. In fact, the flow of steel has begun to reverse. Analysts point out that exports of steel from China are thought to have risen 22% since 2003, with China actually becoming a net exporter of steel in November; a further 14% increase in exports is predicted for 2005.
This news sparked the inevitable overreaction on Wall Street this morning [...]

Yahoo! News: Shares of steel companies tumbled Thursday, after a published report detailed the threat of a global steel oversupply due to China's new position as a net exporter.
Canadian steelmakers Stelco Inc. and Algoma Steel Inc. were among those that lost value on Thursday. Several firms have downgraded the sector in recent weeks on the belief that prices will decline next year and fall even further in 2006. China is central to steel supply and demand, given its rapid pace of industrialization and recent push to add more mills and facilities.
A story in The Wall Street Journal on Thursday said that over the past few years, China has threatened to create a steel shortage due to its high consumption trends. But now the country has become a net exporter due to a slowdown in its domestic demand and greater worldwide capacity. That could signal tougher times for the industry in the years ahead.

Labels: stelco

Well, from one good news story to another ...
WSJ/CNN Money: Industry worries prices will fall as the country's demand slows, steel making capacity rises: WSJ.
China's voracious demand for steel has tempered of late, stoking fears of industry oversupply and falling prices as China becomes a net exporter of steel, its domestic demand slows down and global steel making capacity rises, a newspaper reported Thursday.
Steel demand in the world's most populous country has increased only by about 5 percent a month recently, compared with average increases of 26 percent a month in 2002, 2003 and early this year, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The paper also reported that steel production in China is expected to rise 22 percent in 2004 and another 14 percent in 2005. Last month the country posted net steel exports after being a net importer the year before.
These shifts in the Chinese economy, and others in the future, might force the country to dump excess supply on the worldwide market, sending steel prices down as quickly as they have soared.
This is of course good news for metal stampers who are required to give back 5% per year or some other such formula, but the steel companies cannot be looking at this with a great deal of joy.
Even for metal stampers this isn't great. The disparity in steel prices between North American steel and the world price of steel is currently so high that North American stampers cannot compete with many overseas competitors. The disparity is likely to get worse if China starts flooding the market with cheap steel. So overcapacity may not be good news for anyone.
Time will tell, I guess.

Surely the story of the year for metal stampers ... Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: U.S. steel producers catapulted out of a lengthy depression last year as the star-crossed industry's stars aligned themselves like never before.
The fruits of restructuring and consolidation, surging demand from China, the strengthening economy and a weaker U.S. dollar were the leading reasons for steel's rebound. Analysts expect the prosperity streak to continue in 2005. But it's still an industry in which clouds are always on the horizon, and next year is no exception.
"If the dollar remains weak and China doesn't collapse, the steel business should have a strong 2005," said Charles Bradford of Bradford Research.
The roots of the rebound were sown three years ago, when much of the industry languished in or near bankruptcy, besieged by cheap imports, slack demand and high costs. Bethlehem Steel, LTV Steel, National Steel and other producers shed billions of dollars in pension and retiree health-care costs in bankruptcy, making them more attractive targets for competitors healthy enough to acquire and resurrect them.
Industry leaders International Steel Group, Nucor and Pittsburgh-based U.S. Steel purchased nearly a dozen of their sick sisters and slashed union and management ranks. U.S. Steel reduced its domestic work force by 20 percent and other survivors made comparable reductions. Their restructuring created larger, heathier steelmakers that exert more clout in price negotiations with major customers.

Deutsche Welle: Steel makers in Germany expect production to rise to a new record of 47 million ton in 2005, beating this year's output of 46.5 million ton in the face of booming worldwide demand, the German steel makers' federation said on Monday. The increase would remain only modest because steel makers in Germany were already operating at 98 percent of capacity, federation chief Dieter Ameling said. Raw material prices were also expected to rise, Ameling added.

Miami Herald : PITTSBURGH - Western Pennsylvania's once-thriving glassmaking industry is dwindling, as did the domestic steel industry and for many of the same reasons: competition and cost.
On Wednesday, 102-year-old Houze Glass Co. closed in Fayette County, the third glass company in the region to close in the past two months. The closure puts 57 workers out of a job.
The domestic glass industry has been in decline for a number of years, said Ray Burhop, a Tampa, Fla., consultant for the glass container industry.
'Glass used to be used for everything you can think of in food packaging,' he said. Now many products are likely to be packaged in plastics and cans instead of glass.
The glass container industry is now largely dependent on the beer and liquor industry, he said.
'For years, I've always described the glass container industry much like the steel industry,' Burhop said. 'It's a heavy industry, high labor costs, high energy costs ... lots of capitalization.'
'Once you put on a glass furnace, you don't shut it down until the summertime, when you repair it' - and that is costly, especially with the high cost of natural gas, said Anne Madarasz, chief curator at the Sen. John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center.

Detroit Free Press: Federal-Mogul Corp. did it. So did Intermet Corp.
Oxford Automotive Corp. did it twice.
They're parts makers that have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the last several years, and auto industry experts expect more suppliers will ask federal courts to help them ditch money-losing contracts and operations in 2005.
The problem stems from rising costs. Prices for such things as energy, plastic, steel and health care are going up. But suppliers can't pass those increases along to their customers -- the automakers.
Indeed, the car companies are pressuring parts makers to lower prices even as some of them, particularly Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Corp., cut production and buy fewer parts.
Smaller and mid-level suppliers are particularly hard hit. They can't push demands for lower prices any further down the production chain because they're at the bottom. They also aren't big enough to cover a money-losing contract with profits from other parts of their business.

The archives of this blog from May to July are strangely unavailable. The monthly archive files are there, but if you try to go to an individual post, the individual posts are not available in the archives. And if you look at the URLs it tries to generate, they're not valid file names.

I'm not sure what's going on, but this appears to be a BLOGGER bug ...

I'll post more as I find out what's going on.

Chicago Sun-Times: Canada and the European Union said Tuesday they will cooperate to maximize the effect of sanctions they plan to impose on the United States in retaliation for U.S. steel industry protection measures.
The WTO gave the go-ahead for the EU, Canada and six other complainants to introduce sanctions after Washington failed to repeal a 2000 law [ed. note: the Continued Dumping and Subsidy Offset Act of 2000, commonly called the Byrd Amendment (google search)] that allows American companies to receive proceeds from duties levied by the U.S. government on foreign products allegedly sold at below-market prices in the United States.
The U.S. steel industry has been the major beneficiary of the law.

MEPS: FLAT PRODUCTS
US domestic transaction prices continue to slide. The market has slowed down. Customers' inventories are full - service centre stocks at the end of September were the highest in 17 months. The mills have caught up with order backlogs. Import volumes are growing. [...]
We have noted a significant drop in Canadian mill transaction values this month. Market activity is subdued. A lot of imports are arriving at very attractive prices. Those service centres which rely solely on domestic material are suffering because the price differential can be as much as $C130/240 per tonne.

China's Steel Consumption Rises 15.78% In Jan-Oct:
At the same time, China's output of rolled steel jumped 22.86 per cent, but import dropped 17.86 per cent. Domestically made steel products snatched 90.05 per cent of the country's market share, up 4.04 percentage points year on year.

Interfax :: China: The Chinese government will continue to control the development of the iron and steel and electrolytic aluminum sectors in 2005 to prevent excessive fixed asset investment and blind business expansion.
Ma Kai, director of the National Development and Reform Commission, said at the National Development and Reform Executive Meeting that the government would strictly control the iron and steel, electrolytic aluminum, coke, concrete, and calcium carbide sectors by restricting land approvals and loan extensions and optimizing and sticking to standards for energy and raw materials consumption, environmental protection, and security.
The government will do everything possible to allay power shortages this winter and throughout next year but will at the same time clean up the power sector by eliminating unregulated power plants. Authorities will strictly control or stop providing power for high power consuming and high polluting enterprises that fail to comply with national industry development policy.

House of Representatives > Small Business Committee: Don Manzullo (R-IL) today told a national audience that America must preserve and strengthen its manufacturing base if our nation is to continue leading the world in technology and innovation.
Manzullo spoke on a panel promoting the “National Innovation Initiative� in Washington, D.C. Manzullo was joined by Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, former Michigan Governor and National Association of Manufacturers President John Engler, Johns Hopkins University President Bill Brody, and Sandia Labs President Paul Robinson.
“Our corporations and our government must start thinking long term and dedicate themselves to an ‘ecosystem of innovation’ which encourages research and development in our manufacturing sector,� Manzullo said. “It’s the only way we are going to encourage our young people to seek out the fields of innovation and preserve our world dominance in technology.�
The National Innovation Initiative, a distinguished blue ribbon committee, was formed to issue a Call to Action to stem the growing erosion of innovation in America. The committee consists of many noted academics, government thought leaders and industry executives, including Sam Palmisano, CEO of IBM, Duane Ackerman, CEO of BellSouth, and Pat Russo, CEO of Lucent Technologies.

Why didn't North America recycle our own steel? BBC NEWS: Wednesday, 11 September, 2002
In the north Indian state of Punjab, scrap metal salvaged from the debris of the World Trade Center in New York is being recycled to produce steel for use in building construction.
Nearly 20,000 tons of heavy melting scrap, was recently shipped across the globe to Punjab's main steel town of Mandi Gobindgarh, some 300 kilometres north of Delhi.
The scrap metal will be reprocessed in dozens of furnaces in one of Asia's biggest steel smelting towns.
Steel from the huge concrete columns that once supported the grand twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, will now be smelted to construct new buildings across north India.

Here's a new (to me, anyways) steel recycling problem .... BBC NEWS: For more than two weeks, a team from the army has been checking and defusing shells recovered from 11 truck-loads of scrap metal imported by a private company.
The army was called in after 10 workers at this private foundry were killed last month when the heavy metal scrap they were handling exploded.
The blast was caused by live shells in the imported scrap. Bhushan Steel officials said the scrap had come from Iran via Dubai.

Asia Pulse via Yahoo! Australia & NZ News : China's voracious demand for steel has been forecast to moderate in the second half of 2005. The Korea Iron & Steel Association said in a report that China's demand for steel will rise just 3.9-5.0 per cent next year, compared with an estimated increase of 7.6 per cent this year.

With all the discussion recently about prices of odd raw materials like coke and iron ore, I thought it might be good to provide some info on how steel is made, so this discussion can be better understood.

Dofasco, a local steel supplier just an hour down the road from us, has this interactive guide to how they make steel.

UK Steel has an excellent set of 4 flow diagrams and corresponding text descriptions. They talk about how the steel is made and common uses for the resulting steel.

[updated] here are the articles I promised earlier in the week:

• Steel.org (American Iron & Steel Institute) How steel is made (quite a series of articles. If you're a visual person, like me, some of these articles are long on words and short on diagrams, but others are easier on the eyes)
  
• Key-to-Steel.com has this article on Steel Making Processes
  
• Steelprofiles.com How Steel is Made article (certain parts of this web site are off limits unless you subscribe ... )
  
• IISI (International Iron & Steel Institute) worldsteel.org intro to steel in a question and answer format
  

Some things I learned:

• Blast furnaces have been around since the 14th century.
  
• The hot air blown in the bottom of the furnace (the "blast") takes 6-8 seconds to get to the top(!)
  
• The raw materials dumped in the top take 6-8 hours to descend to the bottom (probably fighting all that rising hot air going the other way).
  
• 70% of the steels used in automotive production today did not exist 10 years ago
  

Here's an amusing article about a university professor making microwave steel using 6 microwave ovens he bought at WalMart.

Labels: Dofasco

Yahoo!: Kobe Steel Ltd plans to boost sales of ironmaking facilities that do not use blast furnaces in order to offer a less expensive way to make the steelmaking material.
Kobe Steel's facility subjects iron ore powder to natural gas under high temperature to eliminate oxygen from the iron ore in what is called direct reduction ironmaking. The high-purity iron that results is then put into an electric furnace together with iron scrap to make crude steel.
Kobe Steel has been selling the equipment through North Carolina-based Midrex Technologies Inc, which it took over in 1983, the report said.

Yahoo!: Nippon Steel Corp has agreed with Australian and Canadian suppliers to pay a record 120 usd or so per ton of coking coal in fiscal 2005, about double on the year, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported over the weekend, without citing sources.
In a bid to secure a steady supply, Nippon Steel has accepted a second straight year of price hikes presented by coal producers such as BHP Billiton and Canadian entity Elk Valley Coal Corp on the back of tighter supply-demand conditions, the report said.
The price hike will affect hard coking coal, which is used to manufacture steel.
Among other steelmaking materials, iron ore is expected to rise in price in tandem with the uptrend in coking coal prices, which would translate into even higher costs for steelmakers, the report said.
Nippon Steel and the other companies will not likely be able to absorb the additional costs on their own, so they will try to pass them onto major customers such as automakers and shipbuilding companies next spring

Asia Pulse via Yahoo! Australia: "China's output of crude steel, steel products and pig iron grew 21.2 per cent, 23.5 per cent and 30.6 per cent year on year in November this year, according to latest statistics provided by the National Bureau of Statistics."

Yahoo! News: "The head of European steel group Arcelor Guy Dolle has predicted a good fourth quarter for the company but warned of a difficult second half for the overall sector next year as demand from China slows.
[...]
Dolle tried to minimize concerns that China's move beyond self-sufficiency in steel consumption could have a negative impact on US and European steel giants.
But he acknowledged that slowing Chinese demand for commodities would likely dent global sector growth next year, particularly in the second half.
"We believe growth next year will be a little less, at four percent instead of seven-eight percent this year, but we don't see any scenario with collapse," he said.
Dolle said he was not alarmed by news earlier this week that three new steel plants with a future capacity of 16.5 million tonnes a year had been approved by Chinese authorities. "

BusinessWeek : "Lakshmi Mittal is building the biggest steel company on earth. What will he do when the glut comes? "
The end of this article is very interesting ...
Mittal will doubtless keep seeking ways to expand. Dollé of Arcelor thinks that in 10 years the industry will be dominated by four or five majors. The candidates include Mittal, Arcelor, Shanghai Baosteel Group, a Japanese entry, and, possibly, Posco (PKX ) in South Korea.
Mittal still has holes to fill in his portfolio. The big priority is China -- a tough nut to crack. He recently launched a $100 million finished steel operation Liaoning province. But acquisitions are getting more competitive. A bid by U.S. Steel drove up the price of the Polish plants, and Mittal lost out to the Pittsburg-based rival on a plant that he coveted in Slovakia in 2000.
And while Mittal has low costs, big capital commitments could be a stretch during a downturn. In the last steel slump his companies struggled. Mittal figures that consolidation and a focus on profits rather than volume in the industry will head off supply gluts in the next crunch. Others, including some Mittal insiders, think the next downturn could be vicious. A wild card is China, which in the last decade has added capacity equal to 90% of the eurozone.

DenverPost.com: "General Steel Corp. engaged in consumer fraud and deceptive business practices by leading customers to believe they were getting deep discounts on steel buildings, a judge ruled.
Jefferson County District Judge Brooke Jackson imposed the maximum fine of $200,000 on owner Jeffrey Knight and lesser fines on other company officials. He also ordered restitution for customers of the company, which sells steel buildings used in agriculture and commerce.
The judge said that the General Steel, in some of its ads including those done by personalities Paul Harvey and Rush Limbaugh, pitched products at 50 percent off, when the buildings were being sold at full price."

AP Wire: "prices are expected to increase early next year, fueled by strong demand in China and elsewhere and scarcity of raw materials.
Analysts see no sign of demand abating anytime soon.
China is in the midst of an industrial revolution and can't produce enough steel - a condition that's expected to last at least through 2005"

Yahoo! News: "job market slack will help to keep prices in check and the latest numbers hint that employment conditions remain lukewarm. "

It's nothing directly to do with steel or metal stamping, but who doesn't use an (IBM) PC Clone these days?
Yahoo! NewsLenovo has acquired IBM's personal services business for $1.25 billion

China Computer Maker Acquires IBM PC Biz
Under the terms of the deal, which ends IBM's long transition from PC pioneer to peripheral player, IBM will keep an 18.5 percent stake in the company, said Lenovo's chairman, Liu Chuanzhi.
Lenovo is taking over IBM's desktop PC business, including research and development and manufacturing, Liu told reporters in Beijing.
The acquisition would make Lenovo the third-largest PC company in the world, he said.
While still very well-regarded in terms of quality, IBM's PC business ranks a distant third in terms of units sold, having surrendered the market lead by the late 1990's
Globally, [in 2004] IBM [had] a 5 percent market share [compared to] 16.4 percent for Dell Inc. and 13.9 percent for Hewlett-Packard Inc., which makes both the HP and Compaq brands.

This article has nothing to do with steel, but everything to do with the economic, social and political impact of our purchasing decisions ... ColumbiaChronicle.com - 2004-12-06: Everybody loves a bargain, especially during the holiday shopping season.
But for every dollar we save by trolling the aisles of our local shopping mall or giant retail store, somebody, somewhere else is probably picking up the tab.
Just because many of these costs are hidden from the average consumer doesn’t mean they’re not there.
[discussion of low wages paid for store employees, and tax benefits to big box stores ... ]
While it’s a lot of fun to get a pair of running shoes for less than $20 or a brand-new DVD player for under $50, it’s less exciting when you find out that they may have been assembled by workers in Asia, making little more than a dollar a day—or by prisoners who had no other choice.
For example, it is suspected that a substantial amount of the products stamped “Made in China� and sold here may be the result of prison labor.
Many outside observers believe China’s vast prison system includes forced labor camps where inexpensive consumer goods are produced before being shipped to the United States.
In 2003, the U.S. bought more than $103 billion in consumer goods from China. Wal-Mart alone imported $12 billion of that, making it almost certain that products made by prisoners found their way onto American shelves.
And beyond how these cheap products affect our pocketbooks is how they affect our spirits.
In many parts of the country, shopping malls and mega-retailers have almost completely replaced public gathering places, turning the town square into a corporate profit center.
Meanwhile, we only see our neighbors when we’re in the car on the three-lane off ramp leading to the IKEA parking lot, and not in a post office, city hall or while window-shopping on our neighborhood Main Street.
And we spend more time and energy talking to the salesman in the appliance department than we do the cop on the beat.
We feel proud of ourselves, and think we’ve accomplished something as a citizen, when we find the best bargain and end up paying less than the other guy.
And we suffer for it, somehow, in ways we may not be aware of on a day-to-day basis.
We like to think of the holiday season as a time when we put aside the cares of the workaday world, and practice warmth and fellowship for those around us and mankind as a whole.
But every time we spend our hard-earned dollars on a cheap product that cut somebody’s wages, stole tax dollars away from a classroom or senior citizen’s center, helped support a ruthless, repressive regime or kept us from knowing our neighbor a little better, we make a mockery of those ideals we believe we’re celebrating.
In the end, that’s no bargain. No matter how much money we’ve saved ourselves.

2004-12-06 - Business First of Columbus: "Steel is such as hot commodity that Hardin Construction Co. of Atlanta recently offered to pay up-front for all the reinforced steel needed for a job and store it in order to protect the price for its customer. But it didn't work. "

Reuters via Yahoo! News : It may be just dead plants buried deep underground for millions of years, but coal is big business these days.
As with nickel, copper and zinc before it, Canada's coal is fodder for China's seemingly endless appetite for raw materials to feed its booming economy. [...Coal] is used to make steel and cement, and to fire power stations.
[...]
'We come out of an extended period of extremely low commodity prices. The weaker producers were forced out of the business, no significant new supplies have come on and suddenly we are facing new demand,' said Robin Goad, president and chief executive of Fortune Minerals, the owner of a large anthracite deposit in British Columbia.
'The world has a tendency of overproducing and the pendulum will swing back. But certainly for the next few years, I anticipate that we will have very strong prices,' Goad said.
Behind Australia, Canada is the world's second-biggest exporter of metallurgical, or coking, coal, which is heated to melt iron ore in steelmaking. About two-thirds of steel production is dependent on this combustible black rock.
Analysts predict that Canada's producers could get $100 or more a tonne for their coal in 2005, double what they got this year, as China's steel output, now in its fourth year of 20 percent growth, shows few signs of slowing.
"Demand remains strong and the structural supply constraints faced by all producers are unlikely to be rectified within two to three years," said Chris Lancaster, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets.
"The Canadian producers are literally 'maxed' out. They have sold everything that they can produce," said Jason Hayes, an analyst at the Coal Association of Canada.
"They're attempting to ramp up production to meet demand but production is related to capital expenditures on equipment. To buy a truck or shovel is not a small investment and takes time," he said.

Labels: Copper, nickel

Lots of things go into the making of steel, some of them so far behind the scenes you never read about them ...
The Tribune Chronicle: "A worldwide shortage of coke [...] means ISG must keep the Warren plant running at peak production.
The stack needed repairing because 25 years of wear and tear had caused the brick inner shaft - where the gas rises - to lean against the outer stack, which provides a shield against the weather.
If solid clay bricks fell in to the stack, they could block the waste heat passages that allow gas to flow from the 85 ovens, putting the operation in peril, said Joe Magni, the plant's manager of engineering.
'We'd have to shut the battery down,'' he said.
The $350,000 capital project brought in four workers from Buffalo, N.Y.'s, International Chimney Corp. to replace bricks in the inner shaft and outer lining.
The company is experienced at 'skywalking,'' taking projects ranging from a couple of hundred feet high to 1,200 feet high, such as power plant stacks. It also is well-known for working on lighthouses; it gained fame for moving the 198-foot tall Cape Hatteras, N.C., lighthouse away from the eroding shoreline in 1999.
To get to the top, workers first had to anchor 28 ladders to the side of the stack. They start their shift each day at 7:15 a.m. by climbing the ladders to the top, where they stay until they come down at 4 p.m."

The Steubenville Herald-Star: "
Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel Corp.'s $114 million electric arc furnace under went its first operational heat Sunday, bringing the project in ahead of schedule.
The Consteel EAF is a state-of-the-art continuous steelmaking furnace. Its integration into Wheeling-Pitt's traditional blast furnace hot end is unique in the United States. Among the EAF's advanced features are: a continuous scrap feed conveyor; a preheating process that heats the scrap steel used to charge the furnace to 1,000 degrees; and the ability use either 100 percent scrap or a mix of scrap and liquid iron.
The company reported the electric arc furnace will produce steel that meets all Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel's current requirements. The electric arc furnace at Wheeling-Pitt is unique in that it can utilize blast furnace iron mixed with scrap steel as well as utilizing only scrap steel as the raw material.
'We had a controlled and successful startup that produced the furnace's first heat,' said Don Keaton, vice president of steel manufacturing and procurement. 'Today's milestone was the culmination of months of preparation and training by the steelmaking division, which is prepared to ramp up production in 2005 to world class levels.'"

New Orleans Times-Picayune : "Terminals at the Port of New Orleans are once again replete with imported steel, one year after President Bush rescinded steel tariffs that for 20 months kept the port's most important import away from its docks.
From January through August, the last month for which data are available, steel shipments to the nation's No. 2 steel port climbed about 70 percent compared with the same period last year, when steel barely trickled in. "

I thought steel prices had stopped rising. ...
Associated Press
: "AK Steel Holding Corp. on Friday said it will increase base prices for its carbon, flat-rolled steel products sold on the spot market by $50 per net ton, effective Jan. 1."

Yahoo!: "Suzuki Motor Corp, Japan's largest mini-vehicle maker, said it will reduce its domestic output in December by 13,000 vehicles due to shortage of steel.
'Suzuki's two domestic factories will halt operations for one or two days due to a steel shortage,' said a company spokesman who declined to be identified.
He said production will be suspended for one day at the automaker's Kosai plant, and for two days at its Iwata plant, both located in Shizuoka Prefecture near Tokyo.
He said both plants have been operating on weekends, and production would be halted on some weekends.
The Suzuki spokesman could not say if production would be affected beyond December by the shortage of steel."

CBS MarketWatch: "No change in production is expected in January and February, but there is a risk of lower production in March"