Weekly domestic raw steel production rose by 1.5% to 1.881 million tons (mt) for the week ending June 30, 2012, breaking a string of six weekly consecutive declines since the post-recession high of 2.005 (mt) reached on May 12, 2012 and up some 1.5% compared to the year-ago level.  The lowest production level since the recession began was 800,000 for the week of December 27, 2008.

We would caution readers that only half of the AISI reporting companies release their weekly production in ‘real time’ so the other half of this data is estimated – using prior months’ reported production & operating rate. What this means is that when business is improving or deteriorating, the weekly data has a meaningful lag.

Capacity utilization also rose from 75.0% last week to 76.1% this week and higher than the year-ago level of 75.8%.  The lowest capacity utilization rate since the recession began was 33.5% for the week of December 27, 2008; the highest was 81.1% on May 12, 2012.

Note: AISI weekly production data only includes real-time input from 50% of producing members; the remainder of the data is a guesstimate based on each company’s prior-month production and therefore the weekly AISI data lags when there are production cuts or increases going on.

Source: AISI and Steel Market Intelligence