World crude steel output soars 6.3% in July

Global – A 10.3% year-on-year increase in Chinese output helped catapult world crude steel production to 143.245 million tonnes in July – an increase of 6.3% over the 134.798 million tonnes in last year’€™s corresponding month. The production surge in Turkey was even more pronounced as its 3.345 million tonnes of output represented a hike of 27.8% over the total for July 2016.

Most of the world’s leading producers upped their output in July this year, including India (+3.5%), the USA (+5.6%) and the EU (+3.9%), although downward moves were made by Japan (-4.3%), Russia (-8%) and Ukraine (-12.9%). Across all 67 countries reporting to the World Steel Association, crude steel capacity utilisation of 72.1% in July meant a gain of 3.2 percentage points over the same month last year but a decline of 1.5 percentage points when compared to June 2017.

Rolling together the data for the first seven months of the year, world crude steel production was 4.6% or more than 43 million tonnes higher than in January-July 2016 at 977.321 million tonnes, bolstered by a jump of 5.1% – or around 24 million tonnes – in China to 491.553 million tonnes. Double-digit percentage increases were recorded by Turkey (+13.6% to 21.559 million tonnes) and Brazil (+10.6% to 19.555 million tonnes) while output growth was also registered by India (+5.4% to 58.017 million tonnes), the EU-28 (+3.9% to 99.589 million tonnes), South Korea (+3.5% to 40.868 million tonnes) and the USA (+2.1% to 47.748 million tonnes). Conversely, January-July crude steel output declines occurred in Japan (-0.2% to 60.913 million tonnes), Russia (-0.5% to 40.925 million tonnes) and Ukraine (-15% to 12.314 million tonnes).

From the regional perspective, there were across-the-board production increases for South America (+9% to 24.792 million tonnes), the Middle East (+8.6% to 17.907 million tonnes), Africa (+10.1% to 7.777 million tonnes) and Oceania (+3.9% to 3.39 million tonnes) in the opening seven months of this year.