Worldsteel just published the data for crude steel production for December 2009 and in doing so the total for the year. You can see their press release here and the data for 2009 and back to 2006 by month and country in the Nerds spreadsheet below.
December crude steel production was just about flat with November at around 106MT. Global steel capacity utilization worldsteel claims to have been around 72%. As a result, total crude steel production in 2009 was a little over 1.2Bn tonnes, or about 8% below the total in 2008. Allowing production to equal consumption for a moment, the 8% decline matches the decline in steel consumption predicted in February by Tony’s correlation of IMF GDP forecast data and steel consumption.
You will find that the worldsteel data does not add up – literally. That’s not because it’s wrong, but because there are countries missing from the data and the monthly data is not updated when the annual total is published. Both monthly progress and annual total are included below.
