From the category archives:

Articles

Repairing steel demand

August 16, 2010

The four worst post-war (WWII) declines in US steel demand occurred in 1958, 1975, 1982 and last year, 2009. In the recent US Steel Q2 conference call, US Steel CEO John Surma wisely reflected, in the context of how much capacity to keep running, that some of the recent steel demand destruction could be permanent. […]

Read the full article →

China’s steel demand to peak at over 1 billion tonnes?

August 12, 2010

The Australia National University recently held a conference called China Update 2010.  A complete list of papers presented at the conference can be found here.  Among the papers was a very interesting analysis of China’s steel intensity.  See paper #5 China’s metal intensity in comparative perspective by Huw McKay, Yu Sheng and Ligang Song. The authors attempt […]

Read the full article →

2010 and 2011 GDP and steel demand growth

August 11, 2010

The IMF recently updated its forecast for world GDP growth in the latest World Economic Outlook.  The global economy is projected to grow at 4.6% this year and 4.3% next year.  If you look at the historical relationship between world GDP growth and world steel demand growth, the IMF forecast would lead one to expect […]

Read the full article →

What to make of Anshan’s investment in the USA – Mk II

June 22, 2010

In late May, I posted an article here called “What to Make of Anshan’s investment in the USA”. It was in reference to the investment by Chinese steelmaker Anshan in John Correnti’s Steel Development Company. The point of my piece was to explore why Anshan might do such a thing. The only real sense I […]

Read the full article →

2010 GDP growth and steel demand forecast

February 12, 2010

The IMF recently released an updated forecast of global GDP growth for 2010.  As many of you know, I’m fond of using the historical relationship between GDP and steel demand to forecast steel demand growth.  In fact, last year about this time I provided a forecast of 2009 global steel demand using the latest available […]

Read the full article →

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 […]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries