SMU Data and Models
August 23, 2015
Distributors Appear Poised to Have Excessive Inventories Thru End of Year
Written by John Packard
Steel Market Update (SMU) produces for our Premium level members a number of articles/analysis related to the Metal Service Center Institute (MSCI) data which is released on a monthly basis. One of the articles is our Service Center Inventories Apparent Excess/Deficit analysis.
Our Apparent Excess/Deficit is the number of tons either over or under what our proprietary model considers to be a balanced inventory at that point in time. Distributors have been running an excess of flat rolled inventories since September 2014. Inventories peaked in December 2014 and into January 2015 and had been slowly dropping through March before stagnating around 600,000 plus tons.
