Steel Mills
October 17, 2014
Service Center Intake, Shipments and Inventory September 2014
Written by Peter Wright
Total service center carbon steel shipments in September increased by 21,100 to 3.498 million tons. Shipping days were unchanged at 21. On a tons per day basis, (t/d) shipments increased from 165,600 tons in August to 166,600 in September. In each of the last four months t/d shipments for each particular month was the best since 2008.
Daily shipments in September increased by 0.6 percent from August, the average increase August to September since 2004 has been 0.5 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.
