SMU New Apparent Excess/Deficit Inventory Forecast

Last month we forecast that February carbon flat rolled shipments would be down 5 percent year over year and that the steel receipts would be 10 percent lower than their 3 year average. We projected total shipments at 2,151,000 tons and the MSCI reported shipments of 2,154,700 tons. We projected inventories would end the month of February at 5,138,000 tons and the actual number came in at 5,154,000 tons. These are about as close to perfect that any forecaster could hope for.

The service center inventory Apparent Excess was forecast to be +220,000 tons (which is getting darn close to balanced, especially if the trend is for service centers to continue to reduce inventories in March) while the actual number was +232,000 tons.