UPDATE 4-Steelmaker Nucor posts third consecutive qtly loss

* Q3 loss 10 cents v Street view loss 15 cents

* Revenue drops 58 pct

* Stock falls 4.3 pct (Adds CEO comments, updates stock price)

By Steve James

NEW YORK, Oct 22 (Reuters) - Steelmaker Nucor Corp (NUE.N) posted a third consecutive quarterly loss on Thursday, due in part to lower shipments and high-cost raw material inventories at its sheet mills.

Although the third-quarter loss was narrower than Wall Street had expected, Nucor gave a negative outlook for any improvement in the short term and its stock fell 4.3 percent to $44.02 in afternoon trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

"Apparent demand did increase in the third quarter due to the end of customer de-stocking," Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer Dan DiMicco told Wall Street analysts.

"However, there's been no meaningful real improvement in end-use demand. And the fourth quarter will also present the usual seasonal issues driven by the holidays and year end plant shutdowns by customers.

"While our fourth-quarter results will benefit from significant improvements and raw material costs, our results could be negatively impacted by the potential of lower operating rates in both sheet and bar products," DiMicco said.

"We believe real demand is in for a long, slow recovery."

John Ferriola. Nucor's chief operating officer for steel making operations, said steel demand remains weak across all product groups. "The increase in the overall U.S. industry average utilization rate to the current level of about 60 percent is the result of customers no longer de-stocking their inventories.

"It is not the result of any improvement in real demand. End-use markets remain very soft," said Ferriola.

The net third-quarter loss was $29.5 million, or 10 cents per share, compared with earnings of $734.6 million, or $2.31 per share, a year earlier, the Charlotte, North Carolina-based company said. Revenue plummeted 58 percent to $3.12 billion from $7.45 billion.

Analysts on average were expecting a loss of 15 cents on revenue of $2.98 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Nucor uses scrap metal and pig iron to manufacture steel in electric arc furnaces, and the company said earnings were hurt by large inventories of pig iron it purchased just before last year's economic downturn.

For the third quarter, it said, the negative impact of the high-cost pig iron inventories was about $180 million, or 37 cents per share after taxes.

"They bought large quantities of pig iron last year at the peak of the market, and that's why they lost money," said analyst Charles Bradford of Affiliated Research Group.

"They did better than they had expected because they had some tax credits and a LIFO (accounting) gain on inventories."

Nucor said that in the third quarter it shipped 5.114 million tons of steel -- 24 percent less than a year earlier, but 24 percent more than in the second quarter. The average sales price per ton dropped by 45 percent from the 2008 third quarter.

Nucor said the average scrap and scrap substitute cost per ton in the third quarter was $299, a decrease of 44 percent from $533 in the third quarter of 2008.

The company recorded a credit of $120 million using the last-in, first-out (LIFO) method of accounting to value inventory. compared with a charge of $140 million in the third quarter of 2008. (Reporting by Steve James; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick, Dave Zimmerman, Steve Orlofsky and Richard Chang)