Dallas, Texas 09/20/2013 (Financialstrend) – On September 19, AK Steel Holding Corporation (NYSE:AKS) issued its third quarter 2013 guidance. The Company expects to record a decrease in shipments in the range of 5% to 6% during its 3Q in comparison to its 2Q aggregate shipments. The decrease is believed to be due to two main reasons. First reason sighted was the unplanned downtime at its Middletown blast furnace. It expects to suffer an overall $ 12 million in loss in 3Q due to the unplanned furnace stoppage of which it hopes to recover part of the loss by claiming insurance. The second being the cyclical fall in demand during this time of the year by automobile industry. In terms of pricing, the company is expecting a slight appreciation to the tune of around $4 per ton in 3Q in comparison to the pricing it was able to command in 2Q.
AK Steel shares had gained more than 36% value since September 3 but the shares lost a huge 8.11% of its value on September 19 trading. The share settled at $4.08 down $0.36 from its previous day’s close of $4.5. The share is currently down 24.5% from its prior 52 week high price of $5.9 it had registered in October’12. The share price reflects a 60% increase over its 52 week low evaluation. It has a market cap of $613 million with 136 million shares outstanding. It was a heavily traded stock yesterday with over 12.6 million shares being transacted across the day. In comparison, its 85 day trading average stands at 4.9 million shares traded per day. The AKS shares lost more value than its peers on the bench mark indices. Its share value had dropped by 1.3% where as Dow Jones was down only 0.26% and the basic materials index was down 0.27% in the last one week.
