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James Moss

After 20-some years consulting I'm still fascinated by the problems of strategy development in this basic industry, especially now that it stands at the center of an industrial revolution like no other. You can read more about me here.

Posts by James Moss

Chinese steel industry downturn reports

November 3, 2008

Some of you may have caught this article from China Daily as it passed through the newsfeed in the Nerds sidebars. It’s an account of the current downturn in the Chinese steel industry. For example: According to China Iron and Steel Association, most large steel firms have only managed to break even since July and […]

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2008 World Steel Production by Country by Month

October 30, 2008

As we get set to start measuring the change in global steel production in the fourth quarter, we’ve loaded a useful file to the Freeloads page. It contains all World Steel Association (IISI) crude steel production data back to 1998. It’s annual 1997-2007 and monthly for 2008 through September. The latest data release was October 22nd. You’ll […]

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Malfunction fixed! With upgrades.

October 28, 2008

The temporary malfunction from yesterday is fixed. Sorry to those of you who were online when things went pear-shaped. However, Nerds is once more operating as it should. It’s also now running on the very latest version of WordPress so various things have been improved including the behavior of tags in the sidebar here. Also, you will […]

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Steel producer output reductions by date

October 23, 2008

Reuters India has very helpfully provided a chronology of recent steel industry production cuts going back to the middle of September. This is the link to the article. While the FT today reports the slowdown of Chinese steel production. The essence of the FT report is this… Shan Shanghua, secretary-general of the China Iron and Steel Association, […]

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6 reasons why a downturn in steel won’t be as bad as in the past

October 15, 2008

The tumult in financial markets will spill over into the ‘real’ economy in a number of ways not least of course in slowing economic growth on regional and global levels. Slower economic growth means less steel consumption and production so it’s worthwhile, if a little sobering, to contemplate just how hard steel might be hit. There have […]

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US Carbon Steel Forecast 2009 Presentation

September 16, 2008

NOTE: There’s an updated (for Q4 2008), revised (in Q1 2009) & expanded version of this presentation here: Here’s a shortened version of a presentation I made last week to the MSCI Economic Summit: Forecast 2009 meeting in Chicago. It’s a great event if you get the chance to go. The essence of what I […]

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