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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

World crude steel production up 4% in June

July 20, 2009

The World Steel Association’s crude steel production report published today shows a 4% rise for June over May. Global production is running 21% lower year to date versus 2008, but that varies significantly by region. The developed world is down 45%. The non-China developing world is down 23%. China, by contrast, is up 2%. China […]

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US steel industry capacity utilization over 50%

July 14, 2009

Lots of people are watching the AISI’s weekly utilization data very closely, including us. I referred in a recent post how anemic the improvements in capacity utilization have been and the improvement is indeed slow. But we passed a kind of milestone last week. According to the AISI, the US steel industry got above 50% […]

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China should get out of steel not strong arm iron ore

July 10, 2009

Things have got serious in the iron ore negotiations in China with spurious ‘espionage’ charges levelled against domestic steel producers and Rio Tinto executives – or here if you don’t have an FT subscription. It’s a stretch to call any iron ore information a state secret, so what might have prompted Chinese officials to take […]

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Profile of the German Steel Industry in 2009

July 7, 2009

The German Steel Federation (VDEh) is one of the best sources of information about its national steel industry (and lots of others too) anywhere in the world. Take for instance, this excellent recent profile of the German Steel Industry (in PDF) by Herr Dr-Ing Carl-Dieter Wuppermann. If you send them to us, we’ll be happy […]

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Could the steel industry recession be over?

July 1, 2009

Well it might be – technically. Plenty of people seem to want to say it is in the broader economy. On June 10th the UK’s Guardian newspaper reported the UK recession as being over. Then a week later Liz Sonders, Chief Investment Strategist at Charles Schwab said the US recession is over. There have been […]

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World crude steel production rises 7.4% in May

June 19, 2009

Worldsteel published its world crude steel production report today showing a 21% year on year decline in production through May, but a 7.4% bounce sequentially from April. Of particular note is the vigor of Chinese production which at 46.4MT is just a shade lower than the record production of 46.9MT in June last year. Follow […]

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