It was good while it lasted, but after five years of blue skies market fundamentals are nosediving.  With up to a 50-million-pound bulge in the aero titanium supply chain, there's no doubt shipments will fall.  The question is how far.

Are titanium shipments due to decline after five years of gains? In an industry where there are usually as many opinions as the number of people giving them, there is a surprisingly clear consensus: "Yes."

Reports by IHS Global Insight and Longbow Research LLC, two companies viewed as among the leading independent market trackers, as well as industry forecasts, certainly point to a sharp decline this year, so the more important question is not whether mill product shipments will be down, but just how far they'll fall.

The last time U.S. shipments fell was in 2003, when dispatches of mill products declined 3 percent to 15,700 tonnes (34.6 million pounds) as the industry struggled to pull itself out of the post-Sept. 11, 2001, economic and aerospace tailspin.

Indeed, if some titanium producers didn't have so-called take-or-pay agreements with Boeing Co. and other aerospace contractors, shipments might have declined earlier than this year's projected downturn. As it turned out, despite falling aerospace consumption and a bloated supply chain—exacerbated by a two-month strike at Boeing in the third quarter of last year—shipments in 2008 were up 4.8 percent to 34,800 tonnes (76.7 million pounds).

But official statistical data caught up with the market's eroding fundamentals in the first quarter of this year as...