By North American standards, Algoma Steel Group Inc. is not a heavy hitter.
So the Sault steelmaker doesn't get to set the price it charges its customers.
"Given the size of our company and the size of the marketplace, we don't drive the price. We follow the market price," says Laura Devoni, Algoma's director of corporate affairs and human resources.
But U.S. President Donald Trump's 25 per cent tariff on Canadian steel has already driven up steel prices, helping Algoma absorb part of the tariff impact.
"We've seen the tariffs have already had an inflationary impact on prices, where the prices have gone up fairly quickly in response," Devoni told SooToday at a March 5 community open house held at 105 West St.
"We are responding to the tariffs. There are more potential tariffs coming. What we are focused on are the things we can control: safety, servicing our customers and being really diligent about costs while we're in this uncertain time.
"We don't set prices. We are a price-taker in the marketplace. The marketplace for steel in North America all products is about 100 million tons.
"We're a two-and-a-half-million-ton producer. We don't set the price but we've seen some positive impacts in price related to recent tariff announcements, which will certainly help at this time," Devoni says.
Is there absolutely no room for price-haggling?
"Each of our relationships with customers will be reviewed individually, but in general terms, our pricing aligns with the general market price.
"We've seen a 30 to 35 per cent increase in hot-rolled coil pricing, which is positive. But we can't predict what will necessarily happen given the uncertainty."
Algoma will nonetheless be looking for ways to cut costs to help it navigate the Trumpian tariffs.
"There's staffing, there's projects, there's discretionary spending. We're looking at deferring what we can at this time without having impacts to our service levels, to customers. So we're looking at everything," Devoni says.
But don't look for big line closures or large numbers of tariff-related layoffs.
"At this time, there are no plans to mothball anything other than sun-setting coke and iron when the electric arc furnaces are up and running fully.
"We have to contingency plan, but there are no plans to do any of those things at this point."
One thing that's likely to be deferred is the steel mill's generous corporate sponsorships and community engagement efforts.
"We just hosted an environmental open house, because we are a proud member of this community, and we continue to be engaged in the community.
"We are attending the Chamber of Commerce International Women's Day breakfast on Friday. So we will continue to take part in this community.
"We may have to be more mindful of the things we're doing and the support we're giving at this time, just because of all the uncertainty.
"But we're not backing away from this community, okay."
