Steel capacity utilisation slips below 70% in June

Global – Having reached 71.3% in May, crude steel capacity utilisation among the 66 countries reporting to the World Steel Association (WSA) slid to 69.4% the following month, equivalent to a drop of 3.3 percentage points from June 2015.

And the countries’ combined crude steel production total of 794.849 million tonnes for the first half of this year was 1.9% lower than the 809.895 million tonnes for last year’s corresponding period.

Despite this overall decline, some of the major Asian steelmaking nations upped their outputs in June, including China with a year-on-year increase of 1.7% to 69.47 million tonnes. India raised its production by 3.9% to an estimated 7.785 million tonnes while Japan recorded an upturn of 2.7% to 8.76 million tonnes.

Russia and Turkey also produced more crude steel this June: the former posted a year-on-year increase of 2.5% to 5.783 million tonnes and the latter a 2% improvement to 2.866 million tonnes.

When rolling together the figures for the first half of 2016, only four of the world’s leading steelmaking nations recorded year-on-year production gains: India (+2.7% to 46.384 million tonnes); the USA (+0.2% to 40.064 million tonnes); Turkey (+3.2% to 16.491 million tonnes); and Ukraine (+10.3% to 12.413 million tonnes).

Despite their aforementioned increases in June, less crude steel was produced across the first six months of this year by China (-1.1% to 399.56 million tonnes) and Russia (-1.3% to 35.18 million tonnes).