Steel Mills
January 21, 2015
Service Center Intake, Shipments and Inventory in December
Written by Peter Wright
Total service center carbon steel shipments in December increased by 16,900 tons to 2.996 million tons. This was mainly due to an increase in shipping days from 19 to 22. On a tons per day basis (t/d) shipments decreased from 156,800 to 136,200.
In the eleven years 2004 through 2014 December shipments on average have been 14.7 percent less than November. This year December was down 13.1 percent from November, we can expect January shipments to be up by 16.4 percent when the data is released next month. 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.
