Below is a list of common questions that we receive. If there is anything not covered below, please send your questions to cruindices@crugroup.com or call us on +44 20 7903 2056.
Within the steel division there are just over 200, the vast majority of which are published monthly. These cover steelmaking raw materials, semi-finished and finished products in all of the major regions around the world.
Weekly price indices include: US, Italian, German and Chinese hot-rolled, cold-rolled, hot-dipped galvanised and plate.
The CRUspi is a weighted average of a basket of different grades. For example, the CRUspi flats is comprised of HRC, CRC and HDG. It is also an index where Apr-94 =100. Our weekly price indices (US$/s.ton) are known as ‘The CRU index’ or ‘The CRU’.
Yes, you can get a free 4 week trial of CRU’s weekly Italian and U.S. Midwest hot-rolled, cold-rolled, hot-dipped galvanised and plate price indices. You can apply online via the home page
Access to CRUspi is free. To register, click here
It varies from index to index, but the majority have over 20 years of history.
We have data providers from reputable, established organisations from across the supply chain: producers, traders, service centers, distributors and various end-users.
To be eligible to be a data provider you must be active in the spot market for the grade of material that you wish to contribute and be able to provide data on a regular basis (as per our strict definitions). You can apply here
For our weekly U.S. Midwest price indices we employ our most robust procedures, known as Level 2.0.
To summarise the process:
Our data providers submit the weighted average price and total tonnage volume of their spot transactions online once per week. We run a series of system checks to exclude outliers on the data through a dedicated platform. This data is reviewed and assessed by an analyst. Once the analyst is satisfied with the pool of data the platform calculates the final index price after applying a cap weighting of 30% (based on volume).
Detailed operations manuals are available in the methodology section.
The weekly price indices are published every Wednesday by 2pm GMT.
There are 4 ways to get access:
A single-user, 12 month subscription to a CRU Monitor costs: $3200 / £1780 / €2310. For further information and to subscribe, click here
In order to get a quotation, you will need to email cruindices@crugroup.com stating:
CRU’s price indices are published under copyright. You can only share the index data if you have a licence agreement.
The Steel Sheet Products Monitor, where the steel prices indices for HRC, CRC and HDG feature, is published on the 2nd Wednesday of the month. For the assessments that are not published weekly, this is regarded as the monthly average CRU price.
For U.S. Midwest and Italian domestic HRC, CRC and HDG, the monthly average price is a direct average of the weekly prices in any given month. This monthly average price is published on the last Wednesday of the month.
The fundamental difference is that CRU is an analysis business, as opposed to a news business. We produce price indices to make our market analysis more robust.
In addition, all of our price indices are approved by an experienced market analyst–not a journalist – who contribute to CRU’s market analysis products and forecasting services.