Hourly rates rose in 1st quarter.After barely budging during the second half of 1993, custom injection molders' machine-hour rates rose an average of 1.4% in the first quarter of 1994. That put hourly rates up 3.4% for the year, according to according to prep. 1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians. 2. In keeping with: according to instructions. 3. responses from 121 custom molders to our latest quarterly survey. However, the good news was not spread evenly over all regions of the country. The Southeast, one of the fastest growing areas in terms of plastics-processing activity, saw hourly rates increase more than 10% for the quarter and for the year, while the South Central region saw rates decline for both time periods. Hourly rates in the West--generally the priciest region for custom molding services and also the slowest area to recover from the recent recession--were up 2.6% for the quarter, but down nearly 11% for the year. Based on past trends, hourly rates in the second quarter should have continued the upward trend of the first quarter. That's because the trend in hourly rates typically follows by three months the trend in machine-capacity utilization. As reported last month in our Manufacturing Activity Index (p. 97), custom injection molding injection molding n. A manufacturing process for forming objects, as of plastic or metal, by heating the molding material to a fluid state and injecting it into a mold. capacity utilization Capacity Utilization measures the rate at which a firm makes use of their capital productive capacities, such as factories and machinery. Capacity Utilization generally rises when the economy is healthy and falls when demand softens. increased in the first quarter. We'll test this prediction when we publish the results of our next survey in October. Over the past four quarters, profit margins averaged 12-14% of total hourly-rate charges and the upcharge for a machine operator averaged 16-17% of the hourly rates quoted. Those figures were obtained by comparing hourly rates reported with and without profit margin or operator. The percentages did not vary much for machine sizes from under 100 tons up to 999 tons. (Larger machine sizes were not included in this comparison, owing to owing to prep. Because of; on account of: I couldn't attend, owing to illness. owing to prep → debido a, por causa de the relatively small amount of data on those sizes.) NEW ABC's OF HOURLY RATES Next month we'll report on the trend toward use of so-called Activity Based Costing (ABC ABC in full American Broadcasting Co. Major U.S. television network. It began when the expanding national radio network NBC split into the separate Red and Blue networks in 1928. ) and what it can mean for the way you calculate machine-hour rates. Some molders say ABC makes hourly rates obsolete OBSOLETE. This term is applied to those laws which have lost their efficacy, without being repealed, 2. A positive statute, unrepealed, can never be repealed by non-user alone. 4 Yeates, Rep. 181; Id. 215; 1 Browne's Rep. Appx. 28; 13 Serg. & Rawle, 447. . Others say it just changes the way they're figured. We'll examine both points of view in August. TABULAR tab·u·lar adj. 1. Having a plane surface; flat. 2. Organized as a table or list. 3. Calculated by means of a table. tabular resembling a table. DATA OMITTED |
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