Steel Mills
July 20, 2016
Service Center Intake, Shipments and Inventory through June 2016
Written by Peter Wright
Based on Steel Market Update (SMU) analysis of the recently released MSCI service center inventory and shipment data, total service center carbon steel shipments increased by 169,300 tons in June to 3.220 million tons. The number of shipping days increased by one to 22. On a t/d basis shipments increased from 145,200 in May to 146,300 tons in June.
In the eight years since and including 2009, June shipments on average on a t/d basis have been down by 1.1 percent from May. This year shipments were up by 0.8 percent. Therefore on a long term basis (8 years) the June performance was at least not a deterioration with a small t/d improvement. This observation is only intended to give a long term perspective because MSCI data is quite seasonal and we need to get past that before commenting in detail on current results. Figure 1 demonstrates this seasonality and why comparing a month’s performance with the previous month is usually misleading.
