Along with its global monthly steel production figures, worldsteel also published yesterday its collective wisdom about forecast Apparent Steel Use (ASU) by country through 2011. This is the ‘Short Range Outlook.’
The current forecast (data in the Nerds spreadsheet below) shows about an 11% rise in demand in 2010 to 1.24Bn metric tonnes with a further 5.3% rise in 2011 that takes global apparent steel demand to 1.31Bn tonnes. If achieved, each year would represent successive record levels of demand. But the pattern of demand will be quite different than before the Great Recession.
According to the worldsteel forecast, the developed world will achieve in 2011 only about 80% of its demand in 2008. But the developing world will have risen to 124% of its demand in that same year. Within the developing group, the BRIC’s (Brazil, Russia, India & China) will have soared to 132% of their 2008 demand. Though demand in the developed world will no doubt recover further from 2011, it will continue to lose ground to developing nations. This is the central truth about the state of the current and future world steel industry that all developed nation producers need somehow to accommodate as fast as they can.
All the data of the worldsteel short term forecast (plus 2008 data for reference) and a variety of analytical doodles are all yours below.