The recent divergent trends in regional steel production continue according to the latest crude steel production figures from worldsteel published today. Overall global crude steel production rose about 2.5% in August over the prior month. But year-to-date output versus 2008 is down 18%.
The experience of different regions or economic groups is significantly different. China production grew over 3% in the month to a record 52.3MT. This puts China 6% up on production through August of last year. The rest of the world as a whole by contrast is down 32% year-to-date. And if that data is broken into Developed World and non-China Developing World the declines year-to-date are 42% and 21% respectively. All the data is in the Nerds of Steel production spreadsheet below which also contains the same data by month and country back to 2006.
