MARKET OVERVIEW

摘要

In the April Report, we presented an annualized look at preliminary first quarter pipe and tube shipments. If you will recall, March preliminary shipment numbers represented the highest shipment levels since November of 2008 and indicated a full year 2012 in the range of 20.6 million tons. While the final March totals came in a bit lower than the preliminary tallies, all of the above still holds true. Overall this is very good news for the pipe and tube industry. If we achieve 20.6 million tons we will be within about 8% of the shipment level we achieved in 2008. Drilling down, we said last month that energy product shipments, when annualized, would be about 12.2 million tons which is right on par with the 2008 total. Unfortunately, that means the entire difference in the 2012 projected vs the 2008 actual shipments falls in industrial products. Annualized first quarter industrial product shipments for 2012 are about 8.4 million tons vs the 2008 total of 10.2 million tons. Enough history except for one further comment - the import level in 2008 was about 39% whereas in the first quarter of 2012 it is almost 43%.