Crude steel output: Turkey a stand-out performer in early 2018

Global – Globally in February, crude steel capacity utilisation reached its highest level for five months, with the figure of 73.3% comparing to 72.8% in January of this year and 71.5% in February 2017.

Production across the 64 countries reporting to the World Steel Association (WSA) amounted to 131.791 million tonnes for an increase of 3.5% over the 127.338 million tonnes of February last year.

This means that crude steel output climbed 4% from 265.935 million tonnes in January-February 2017 to 276.652 million tonnes in this year’s corresponding period.

Looking at February in isolation, crude steel production fell year on year in Russia (-5.7%), South Korea (-2.1%), the EU-28 (-0.8%) and Japan (-0.5%) whereas all other major producers recorded gains, including the world’s leading scrap importer Turkey (+8.7%), China (+5.9%), Brazil (+5.5%) and India (+3.4%).

When combining the figures for January and February, Turkey registered the sharpest increase among the world’s major crude steel powers, with its output jumping 8.1% year on year to 6.172 million tonnes.

The increase for China was 5.9% to 136.817 million tonnes while India upped its production by almost 3% to 17.462 million tonnes, exceeding Japan’s 17.321 million tonnes (-0.1% year on year).

Output also edged lower (by 0.5%) in the USA to 13.337 million tonnes, according to the WSA stats. From the regional perspective in January-February 2018, crude steel output was 0.2% higher year on year in the EU-28 at 27.706 million tonnes.

Tis gain was eclipsed by those recorded for South America (+4.9% to 7.079 million tonnes), Africa (+9.9% to 2.412 million tonnes), the Middle East (+22.3% to 6.141 million tonnes) and Oceania (+9.8% to 1.029 million tonnes).

The combined increase for Asia’s leading eight producers was 4.8% to just over 190 million tonnes.