Machine tool consumption up 6% - Brief Article

CHICAGO -- U.S. machine tool consumption totaled $182.66 million in March, up 6 percent from a revised $172.32 million the previous month but down 42.2 percent from $315.8 million in March 2001, according to a joint report by the American Machine Tool Distributors' Association, Rockville, Md., and the Association for Manufacturing Technologies (AMT), McLean, Va. "The poor start to the 2002 machine tool market illustrates that the general economic recovery has not filtered down to manufacturing," said Don F. Carlson, AMT president. "While economic recoveries usually start without a pickup in investments in manufacturing, they never last without sustained manufacturing output." Machine tool consumption in the first quarter totaled $513.62 million, down 35.2 percent fromlast year