SMU Data and Models
March 19, 2015
Flat Rolled Steel Distributors Apparent Excess Inventories Down (But Still Not Enough)
Written by John Packard
Not to toot our own horn too loudly, we came within a whisker of nailing both shipments and inventories in our last Service Center Inventory Apparent Excess/Deficit forecast. In our last forecast we indicated flat rolled shipments would be 2,253,000 tons and based on the MSCI data released earlier this week the actual number was 2,156,000 tons. We missed (or the service centers were short shipments) by 97,000 tons.
On the inventory side, Steel Market Update forecast distributors will be holding 6,123,000 tons of flat rolled inventory at the end of February. The actual number according to MSCI was 6,148,000 tons. The service centers were holding 25,000 more tons than we expected (due to shipments being weaker than expected).
