Steel Mills
September 19, 2014
Service Center Intake, Shipments and Inventory in August 2014
Written by Peter Wright
Total service center carbon steel shipments in August decreased by 61,400 tons to 3.477 million tons. Shipping days also decreased from 22 to 21. On a tons per day basis (t/d) shipments increased from 160,900 tons in July to 165,600 in August. All three months June, July and August had the best t/d shipments of that month since 2008. Daily shipments in August increased by 2.9 percent from July, the average increase July to August since 2004 has been 3.3 percent. Figure 1 demonstrates the seasonality of service center shipments and why comparing a month’s performance with the previous month is usually misleading. For this reason in the SMU analysis we always consider year over year changes.
