Mill Lead Times: Remain Steady

Mill lead times are an important indicator as to the strength or weakness of the mill order books. There are a number of ways to look at mill lead times. One is to go off the lead time sheets produced by some (not all) of the domestic mills. Steel Market Update does follow the lead times that are given to their customers. We also review lead times in our twice monthly flat rolled steel surveys where we take the average of the responses from manufacturing companies and service centers to come up with a number. Here are the trends we are seeing for hot rolled, cold rolled, galvanized and Galvalume production:

Mill lead times continue to be slightly extended as hot rolled averaged 4.23 weeks based on the respondents from this week’s flat rolled steel survey. The HRC average is down 0.40 weeks from the beginning of the month and is shorter than what we saw one year ago when HRC lead times averaged 4.55 weeks.