Business and Industry

Revised historical data for Manufacturers' Shipments, Inventories, and Orders were issued on May 18, 2012. These revisions reflect: benchmarking the shipments and inventories data to the 2010 Annual Survey of Manufactures (ASM) data, as well as revised ASM benchmarks for prior years; incorporating the unfilled orders to shipments ratios obtained from the 2009/2010 Manufacturers' Unfilled Orders Survey by applying these ratios to the respective ASM shipments data, as well as incorporating revised unfilled orders to shipments ratios for prior years; adjusting the new orders data to be consistent with the benchmarked shipments and unfilled orders data; correcting monthly data for late receipts, reclassifications of reported data, and revisions to previously reported data; incorporating the monthly data corrections when producing estimates for industry groups for which we identified companies to be tabbed separately from the link-relative estimation procedure; implementing a new SAS benchmarking program, which is based on the same benchmarking methodology as the previous ASCII FORTRAN program; and updating the seasonally adjusted data, based on the results of benchmarking and the recent annual review of the seasonal adjustment models.

For the Manufacturers' Shipments, Inventories, and Orders Survey, all current month estimates are preliminary estimates and will be superseded in following months by revised estimates.

For information on survey methodology and use of the data, including seasonal adjustment and other information pertinent to this economic indicator, go to the Manufacturers' Shipments, Inventories, and Orders website, which provides a link to historical data.

The Y-axis may be truncated to prevent flattening of the lines or to present the complete range of data. In a future version of the visualization tool, the option to begin the Y-axis at the origin (0) will be available as applicable.