The world’s production of crude steel continued to recover in September 2009 according to the latest output data from worldsteel. It was a modest improvement from August to be sure of a little more than 250KT, but it continued a recovery that has lasted all year.
The world’s record monthly crude steel output was in May of 2008 when it reached about 120MT. As the financial crisis mounted and the seasonal slowdown took its toll, production slumped to just 82MT in December of 2008. Since then, powered by China’s continued expansion, production has recovered to 107MT in September which is all but flat with September of 2008. But one of the notable aspects of September’s output is that Chinese production actually fell by 3% (as noted by Jessica’s post here) and the rest of the world grew by more than 3%.
There’s still an increasingly important division between the prospects for the developed world (down 40% year to date) and the developing world (including China down only 4%) of which more in another post soon. In the meantime, you can study the monthly output by country data in the Nerds of Steel spreadsheet below: