Steel Market Update analyzes Construction Put In Place (CPIP) data to provide a detailed description of activity that accounts for about 45 percent of total U.S. steel consumption.
Each month, the Commerce Department issues its Construction Put in Place (CPIP) data, usually on the first working day covering activity one month and one day earlier. There are three major categories based on funding source: private, state and local, and federal. Within these three groups are about 120 subcategories of construction projects. At SMU, we analyze the expenditures from the three funding categories to provide a concise summary of the steel consuming sectors. For example, we combine all three to reach a total of nonresidential building expenditures.
CPIP is based on spending work as it occurs and is estimated each month from a sample of projects. In effect, the value of a project is spread out from the project’s start to its completion. This is different from the starts data published by the Census Bureau for residential construction, by Dodge Data & Analytics and by Reed Construction for nonresidential, and by Industrial Information Resources for industrial construction. In the case of starts data, the whole project is entered into the database when ground is broken. The result is that the starts data can be very spiky, which is not the case with CPIP.
The official CPIP press release gives no appreciation of trends on a historical basis and merely compares the current month with the previous one on a seasonally adjusted basis. The background data is provided as both seasonally adjusted and non-adjusted. The detail is hidden in the published tables, which SMU tracks and dissects to provide a long-term perspective. This is a very broad and complex subject, therefore, to make this monthly write-up more comprehensible, we keep the information format as consistent as possible. In our opinion, the magnitude of growth or contraction of the various sectors is more important than the absolute dollar value of the expenditures. CPIP data also includes the category of residential improvements, which we have removed from our analysis because such expenditures are minor consumers of steel.
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