This week, the operating rate of the brass billet industry was 61.12%, down 1.73% WoW. According to SMM, despite the stabilization of copper prices in the past two weeks and an improvement in the number of new orders compared to early April, the growth in orders has been limited due to the dual constraints of high copper prices and tight raw material supply. Additionally, with the approach of the Labour Day holiday, production plans of enterprises have been adjusted due to holiday arrangements, with some production lines temporarily shutting down, leading to a decline in the overall operating rate. On the inventory side, the weekly days of raw material inventories of SMM's sample enterprises decreased by 0.04 days WoW to 4.8 days, while the days of finished product inventories increased by 0.26 days to 5.42 days. Overall, brass billet enterprises had limited stockpiling for the Labour Day holiday. Looking ahead to next week, given that the tight raw material supply situation is unlikely to be effectively alleviated and the severe price inversion of secondary brass raw materials is compressing enterprises' profit margins, SMM expects the operating rate to only rise slightly by 0.58 percentage points to 61.7% next week.