BIR Ferrous World Mirror 06/2010

The Ferrous Industry ­- utmost challenging and far from boring!

Dear friends and colleagues, I would like to briefly address some aspects which came into my mind when preparing today's Ferrous Mirror.

Apparent steel demand is forecast to grow by nearly 11% globally this year and by some 5-6 % next year.  This sounds good, although even in 2011, countries of the NAFTA region, Europe and Japan will only reach apparent steel consumption

volumes equivalent to those decades ago. This means that the financial crisis has thrown these countries back by between 14 and 28 years!! Taking these figures into account and looking at actual capacity utilization rates of 75-85%, there seems to be no rational incentive to increase steelmaking capacities in these countries. Projects under construction are already burden enough and an overcapacity problem raises again its ugly head in these countries.

The consequences are that in the future an even bigger share of world steel production will come from the developing countries, with China as the front-runner. More than ever, we will be depending on what is happening in China.

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