A good source of iron ore statistics are reports published by the UNCTAD secretariat (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) in cooperation with the Raw Materials Group, based in Sweden. You can view all the available publications on the Raw Materials Group website, but you can read the full World Investment Report 2007 by downloading different chapters on the UNCTAD website. This report doesn’t provide all the iron ore statistics you may be looking for , but it does examine trends in commodity pricing and the future of the current “commodity price boom”.
Until a few years ago the steel industry was considered mature, and the moniker was accurate. Global steel demand grew more slowly than did the world’s population. In much of the developed world, demand for steel was stagnant after having gone through a long period of decline. Since 1998, however, the steel industry seems to have re-ignited its growth engine and kicked into a new gear. The industry has been growing at 6% annually and most analysts see strong growth continuing for a decade or more. What explains the steel industry’s reemergence and can it continue?
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Before we get too “hoity-toity” about the effects of Chinese industrial expansion on the Chinese and global environment, it’s worth being reminded of events in the not so distant past that affected industrial cities in the West and how we talked about them. Read the rest of this entry »
Here is a list of the top steelmakers in the world, as measured by crude steel production, from 1988 to 2006. iisi-top-steelmakers-1988-to-2006.pdf
