Jason Ellis - Global Executive Leader in Steel, iTradeSteel, Empower Steel

Jason Thomas Ellis has built a three-decade career across the global steel, manufacturing and industrial sectors, taking on senior leadership responsibilities across Australia and international markets. His career reflects experience in strategic planning, operational leadership, business transformation and long-term growth, with notable roles at BlueScope Steel and current leadership positions at iTrade Steel and Empower Steel. Leadership Experience at BlueScope Steel A significant part of Jason Ellis’s executive career was developed through senior roles at BlueScope Steel , where he gained extensive experience across Australian and Southeast Asian operations. His responsibilities covered commercial performance, operations, market development and regional business leadership. His experience with BlueScope also included leadership of downstream operations in markets such as Sri Lanka and Thailand. Working across different markets provided valuable exposure to the challenges of managin...

The headline economic story in Australia at the moment is well-known to anyone reading the business pages. Growth is modest, consumer confidence is subdued, the construction pipeline is not what it was two years ago, and the interest-rate environment is doing what interest-rate environments do to capital-intensive activity. From the outside, that reads as bad news for steel. From inside the industry it reads as something more nuanced. Steel demand is cyclical by nature, and the sector is used to reading cycles. What matters is not whether we are in a soft patch but what kind of soft patch it is, which segments are absorbing the pressure, and which underlying drivers remain in place through the cycle. Thirty years in Australian and Southeast Asian steel has taught me to distrust both the doom-loop headlines and the reflexive optimism from within the industry. The truth usually sits in the segment-level detail. THE SOFT SEGMENTS Residential construction is the most visible weak point. Ap...

Ask most steel buyers what drives the price of a coil, and they will start with iron ore, coking coal, mill capacity and demand. All of those matter. But there is a component of landed cost that moves more, more often, and with less warning than any of them, and it does not appear on any mill quote: freight. I have spent thirty years working across steel manufacturing , distribution and trading, from Australia to Southeast Asia, India and China. In that time I have watched freight go from a rounding-error line item to a first-order determinant of whether a shipment lands profitably or not. It is not the biggest single input in the price of steel, but it is one of the most volatile, and the industry does not talk about it enough. WHY FREIGHT MATTERS MORE THAN IT LOOKS For a container-grade product moving from a Chinese, Vietnamese or Indian mill to Australia, freight can easily represent a meaningful percentage of landed cost depending on the specification, mode and origin. For bulk pro...