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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”.
Below is a presentation I made recently at the SMA Board of Directors meeting in Florida. It deals with the issue of organizational size in today’s steel industry and asks some questions (more than providing any answers) about how the structure of steel organizations will change as they deal with much different dimensions of scale and scope. It also contains some provocative “Zipfian” statistical analysis of industry structure that raises questions as to how consolidation might proceed both in the US and globally.
In the end, there is no argument for or against big or small organizations here. Mittal after all was producing less than 500KT 20 years ago. But in the future, our industry will be populated by much larger organizations than it is today. Organizational innovation is going to be vital to the strategic health of any company of any size that wants to remain successful and independent. Click on the presentation’s ‘Menu’ button (lower right) to see a larger view.
This link will take you to the Ohio EPA page for New Steel International, the working title of MMK’s proposed steel mill investment in Haverhill or Franklin, OH. Deep in the detail you will see estimates of the facility size. It’s not clear exactly how big the facility will be. The plan is to build the finishing end first (cold rolling capacity of 6,000 tons/day) followed by the meltshop (casting capacity of 12,000 tons/day). New Steel International is the name of the consulting company which filed the application on MMK’s behalf.
And on the subject of ThyssenKrupp, here’s a short video from DeutscheWelle (in English) describing the start up of the ThyssenKrupp number 8 blast furnace in Duisburg.
Here’s BlueScope’s detailed description of the what they just acquired from Ternium. Follow the link below and download the original from the link on the righthand side of the page.
