From The Editor

Metal Center News is continuing to accept nominations for its prestigious Service Center Executive of the Year honor. This will mark the 26th year the magazine has honored a leading distribution company executive.

For 20 years, Metal Center News has been using this issue to celebrate the giants of the service center industry. Each September, MCN has surveyed the metals distribution space to uncover the largest players in the industry, to see who’s on top of the bottom line.

Once again, Metal Center News is asking you to nominate a deserving executive for the highest honor in the service center industry. The Metal Center News’ Service Center Executive of the Year will be presented in December.

The annual Steel Market Update Steel Summit kicked off Monday with a fireside chat with the always quotable Cleveland Cliffs’ CEO Lourenco Goncalves and SMU Senior Editor Michael Cowden with the unenviable task of trying to steer the conversation.

The subject line in the parade of garbage emails caught my eye, which is exactly what it’s supposed to be doing. Right there, in the middle of offers of great leads for attendees at the 2021 FABTECH show in Chicago and requests for me to export some high-quality alloy steel was this strange query:

The Metal Center News staff will soon be one person shorter.

Subscribers to Metal Center News should have received the annual AdQ survey, which runs concurrently with our July issue.

During the first half-dozen years I worked at Metal Center News, we ran an annual survey of service center sentiment heading into the new year. You may remember the January cover during that time frame, complete with its series of hand signals identifying just what distributors were feeling as the new year approached.

An annual fixture in the pages in Metal Center News is finally returning. Starting with the October issue, and running in the August issue in subsequent years, MCN will present a sales compensation report from a survey of our readers.

Historically speaking, when the rest of the world is bemoaning rising oil prices, a position that crosses all party lines, the members of the steel supply chain have nodded in seeming commiseration.