Ternium SA Is A Strong Buy

Ternium, Orchid Island, and Mazda are STRONG BUY stocks. Welltower and Hikma Pharma are rated BUY. There were not five upgrades with full valuation and forecast coverage so Orchid, Mazda, and Hikma are included as a courtesy today.

For today’s bulletin, we take a look at Ternium SA (TX ). Ternium S.A. manufactures and processes various steel products in Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, Colombia, the United States, Central America, and internationally. The company operates in two segments, Steel and Mining. The Steel segment offers steel products, such as slabs, billets and round bars, hot-rolled coils and sheets, bars and stirrups, wire rods, cold-rolled coils and sheets, tin plates, hot dipped galvanized and electrogalvanized sheets, pre-painted sheets, steel pipes and tubular products, beams, roll formed products, and other products. The Mining segment sells iron ore concentrates and pellets. The company serves various companies and small businesses operating in construction, automotive, home appliances, capital goods, container, food, and energy industries. Ternium S.A. was founded in 1961 and is headquartered in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Ternium S.A. is a subsidiary of Techint Holdings.

Steel was a good industry in 2017 as the global recovery continued on and steel benefited overall. Ternium was one of the top performers. However, the industry remains plagued by too much capacity no matter the current level of demand.

US President Donal J Trump made many promises during his 2016 campaign vis-a-vis steel–just as he did for coal. However, to date, he has not done much to bolster US producers. We expect a Commerce Department report on imports and dumping any day now, but it was already delayed once back in June. It remains to be seen whether or not Trump will keep his promises to US steel-workers by taking action against foreign producers found to be unfairly competing.

Ternium is a foreign producer, so it could be negatively affected by any sort of trade war if Trump decides to do more than talk about steel dumping. So far, his promises to require US-produced steel for US infrastructure projects have not been shown to be effective–or genuine.