SMU CEO Discusses Service Center Inventories/Shipments

One of the products developed by Steel Market Update over the past four years is our flat rolled and plate steel service center inventories and shipment analysis. I discussed it briefly in Thursday’s newsletter, but I want to go into more detail as I believe it is a report that many of you will want to follow.

One of the reasons why I think our service center analysis is good is due to the variation of the data providers. We went out of our way to include small, medium and large-sized service centers and wholesalers. We have both public and private companies. This is critical to gathering data that is not skewed in one direction or another. We know from experience that large public companies tend to run tighter inventories than privately held companies. If you have too many public companies in your mix, the number of days of supply (or months of supply) can be misleading.