Sal Tharani, Goldman Sachs
Okay. Barbara, you touched upon the working capital. I was just wondering, if I look at since the downturn, 2009, you generated quite a bit of cash from the working capital. You have spent almost $0.5 billion, oh, sorry, almost $600 million in terms of working capital as you are growing the business. I am just wondering how should we look at because that does not… your free cash flow has impacted despite your earnings are improving. How should we look at this quarter? I noticed that your revenue quarter-over-quarter was down $220 million, year-over-year was almost flattish, but your working capital was a massive use of funds. How should we look at it over the next couple of years in terms of having some of that reverse back?
Barbara Smith, SVP and Chief Financial Officer, Commercial Metals Company
Yes, well, another factor affecting the first quarter was AP. If you look at the balance sheet, our payables are much lower, reflective of moving into the slower period. Inventory, we did some building as I said to support higher business activity levels. I mean, as we indicated, M&Ds had one of the strongest quarters since the global financial crisisand a lot of the working capital is going to support the growth in M&D and that will liquidate fairly quickly.
The other factor this specific quarter which is lower accounts payable and we have a number of scheduled payments in the first quarter that affected that. We are still projecting that at some point, we will have a net working capital to support the market growth and then you are going to start to see that cash turn and we are still forecasting positive free cash flow going forward.
Sal Tharani, Goldman Sachs
Okay. Great. Thanks very much.
Operator
Our next question comes from Nathan Littlewood at Credit Suisse.
Nathan Littlewood, Credit Suisse Group
Good morning, guys. Thanks for the opportunity. I just had a couple of questions.
Barbara Smith, SVP and Chief Financial Officer, Commercial Metals Company
Good morning, Nathan.
Nathan Littlewood, Credit Suisse Group
Good morning. I just had a couple of questions for you. The first on your ferrous scrap purchase price for the Americas Mills. It was down I think $7 or $8 bucks a ton quarter-on-quarter. If we look at the domestic assessments from CIU and the like, they were down sort of $20, $25 a ton for your quarter. I’m just wondering,I am asking this as an engineer here, not an accountant. Could you help me bridge the gap there? Was there something strange going on with scrap procurement costs?
Joseph Alvarado, Chairman of the Board, President, and CEO, Commercial Metals Company
Yes, I will take a quick shot at that, Nathan. When you think about the numbers that you are comparing, there is some regional numbers as well. That might be more reflective in comparative and start looking at gross averages of scrap and then the mix within each of the regions. I think you will get some significant divergence. You would have to be able to compare that to what scrap purchase prices were before. You might have been purchasing more competitively. On a quarter-to-quarter basis, I do not get real concerned about that because there are lot of averaging that is going on. We are measuring our cost and need to be competitive in the markets that we are buying and selling in and feel like we are in a good place in that market. You want to comment anything more? I am not sure that I answered that as an engineer or an accountant, probably latter.
Nathan Littlewood, Credit Suisse Group
No problems. That is good. Thanks, Joe. The other one was just on International Marketing and Distribution. You had indicated previously that your expectations for a quarterly run rate there were about $13 million. I guess I am just curious about the sort of going forward impact there from Australia. You have shown us that for the November quarter, that was worth about $2 million. Could we say that looking forward, your expectations for M&D would be $13 million plus the $2 million loss or $15 million total for that business? Does that math make sense?
