MARKET OVERVIEW

摘要

If you want confirmation that the pipe and tube markets are improving, you'll be happy to read this month's edition of the Report. Preliminary March shipment numbers, at 1.878 million tons, are the highest since November 2008 and are significantly above the other two months of this year so far. After a quarter of data, with one of the months represented by licenses and estimates, the pipe and tube industry has shipped 5.157 million tons of product into the U.S. market. While Q1 is typically third in order of shipment size, we'll ignore that for the sake of doing a quick comparison of annualized shipments to date to the forecast we published in November of 2011.