Steel Mills
February 20, 2015
Service Center Intake, Shipments and Inventory in January
Written by Peter Wright
Total service center carbon steel shipments in January increased by 372,400 tons to 3.368 million tons. There was a decrease of one shipping day to 21 in January. On a tons per day basis (t/d) shipments increased from 126,200 in December to 160,400 in January.
In the eleven years since 2004 January shipments on average have been 26.3 percent higher than December. This year January was only 17.8 percent higher than December so this was not a particularly good result. 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.
