Last week I spoke at the AMM State of Steel Conference in Florida. Although I was on a construction panel, I was asked to provide a forecast of 2010 steel demand for the US. As many of you know, we believe the main drivers of steel demand in the US are the NAFTA vehicle build and the level of non-residential construction activity. I used the most recent forecasts for these two markets and came up with a forecast demand level of around 80 MT for 2010, up from 65-70 MT in 2009, but well below the levels of 2004-2008. I also looked at the long-term trend line forecast, which suggests that US demand will probably top out around 115 MT. Here’s the presentation.
We use Google Docs to embed these presentations in our posts. If you’d like a more user friendly version of my slides or have questions about the content, feel free to send an e-mail.
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Yes – finally we’re really back. We’re slightly redesigned, structurally improved and ready to bring you insight into, data from & news about the steel industry once again. It’s been a long road back. Anyone running a blog will tell you that as it grows – like any other construction – the maintenance issues increase in variety and complexity. Some of those issues caught up with us. Thanks to some great help from Bill Erickson we’re on a new host and all dressed up and ready to go again. In the process we have also repaired the RSS and email feeds which are once again available to bring the latest posts to your desktop. As well as signing up to the feed via one of the buttons in the header, it’s always better if you register.
Thanks for visiting. Make it a regular stop. We’ll try to make Nerds as easy to use and as full of use as possible.
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Based on reported import licenses, US flat products imports declined 6% from 423,000 short tons in November to 399,000 tons in December. This can be compared to 474,000 tons of flat products imports in December 2008.
The reduction in imports was driven by a 22% drop in hot roll imports, due basically to lower volumes from Korea, Canada, and the Netherlands. Imports of all other products grew with cut plate imports in particular growing by 38%.
January flat products import licenses reported up to January 19th were 226,000 tons which is likely to mean that full-month imports will be slightly higher than December’s.
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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.
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Chinese crude steel production rose 5% from 47.3 million metric tonnes in November to 49.4 million tonnes in December. This brings total 2009 crude steel production to 568 million tonnes compared to 498 million tonnes in 2008.
Finished steel exports continued to climb, rising 17% in December to 3.3 million tonnes. This can be compared to exports of 3.2 million tonnes in December 2008 and 4.8 million tonnes in December 2007. Net finished steel exports grew from 1.6 million tonnes to 1.9 million tonnes.
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