Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you. (Operator Instructions) First, we'll go to Timna Tanners of UBS.
Timna Tanners - UBS
Yes, hi, good morning.
Keith Busse
Good morning, Timna.
Timna Tanners - UBS
Wanted to know if you could give us a little more insight into how your November, December order books look, specifically for hot rolls and I guess across product lines?
Keith Busse
November hasn't been open all that long. It's building good momentum. I think the major component of strength in November remains value added where we have the best margins, hot rolled tends to be lagging as it has been, Timna, throughout the entire previous quarter.
But it's still steady activity in hot roll. Right now, we would believe that we can get through October certainly at capacity 100% run rate. Something very near that November. Although impacted by a day or two off at Thanksgiving and some project work perhaps here and there.
Especially down at Steel of West Virginia and as Theresa mentioned earlier, we are putting the bag house in at Roanoke.
So, the backlog right now is off slightly but not materially. And we think we'll get through November just fine. We really don't have an outlook, definitively going into December but believe we'll march through that month at a fairly high level of operating activity. We have our Christmas party during that period of time. And we have the Christmas season outages, etcetera, etcetera.
So, production and shipments could be off slightly in December, impacted by seasonality and other factors. Too soon to tell whether or not we'll have the ability to run at full capacity. But we think it's probably fairly near full capacity and in the month of December. And the merchant arena, I think as steady as you go in Roanoke as Dick said, I think clearly from our discussions with our general managers the other day, the lights getting brighter in the tunnel as regard to SPQ bars.
We probably won't see that activity until late in the quarter, early fourth quarter but activity in that arena, at least for Steel Dynamics is picking up at this point in time. As Dick said, Steel of West Virginia is increasing its product portfolio and doing much better than it had been in the past. And as I said earlier, Structural remains a pretty lousy market place but we're still keeping our head above water and generating a pretax income on a fully allocated basis.
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