Late in posting this data, so apologies. worldsteel data for November 2009 crude steel production was released just prior to the holidays on December 21st. World crude steel output in November 2009 was down about 5% month on month. But November 2009 was up about 22% over November 2008. All in all the recovery in steel production continues. World production is likely to be off between 10-15% in 2009 versus 2008 (it’s off 11% so far). China will show a gain of perhaps 15%, the rest of the developing world a decline of about 15% and the developed world about a 35% contraction. The data is shown in the Nerds spreadsheet below.
It’s worth noting that worldsteel began to include estimates of world crude steel capacity utilization from the October bulletin. November’s utilization was 75% implying that world crude steel production capacity is of the order of 143M metric tonnes a month or 1.7Bn tonnes annually. Check the worldsteel press release for some hard to read estimates of all the months in 2009. Oh and Happy New Year!
