The International Monetary Fund recently updated its global GDP growth forecast for 2009 and 2010. Not surprisingly, the growth projections were revised downward. So I thought I’d take the opportunity to update the graph showing the relationship between global GDP and steel demand and to refine the comments I made in a recent post using the previous IMF forecast.
As the graph makes clear, the IMF’s 2009 forecast of 0.5% global GDP growth is dire. In fact, 0.5% global growth would be the worst showing since 1950. (The graph shows data from 1950 to the present). If accurate, the IMF projection suggests global steel demand will fall by around 8% this year, not a pretty picture.
While on the topic of the relationship between GDP growth and steel demand, I also want to respond to a question posed by a reader in response to one of my previous posts on this subject. Gopal wants to know whether I’ve looked at the relationship between GDP growth and steel demand in the US and if so whether there is a positive correlation between the two. The answers are yes and yes, and the data appear in the following graph.
As you can see, the correlation is positive and the r-squared is quite strong at 0.62. I plugged in the IMF’s latest forecast for the US, which has GDP down 1.6% for 2009. The trend line suggests that steel demand in the US will fall by 15% to 20% this year.
Of course GDP is, by definition, a very broad measure of economic activity. If you really want to understand how steel demand in the US is likely to evolve over the next few years, we have found, not surprisingly, that automotive production and non-residential construction are more useful variables. But as they say, “that’s a whole ‘nother can of worms”.
Don’t get me wrong. I love my steel news sources. I’m a steel nerd and, if it existed, I’d want my FeTV too. But here’s a rant that I indulge in once a year because I think the industry’s subscription news sources are lacking and have not yet fully engaged in the search for a new business model like so many other news outlets are having to.
Here’s how the rant starts. Like most other people in the steel industry we’ve been reviewing all our steel news subscriptions and assessing their worth because they’re not very differentiated (strategic hint) and they overlap. Renewing your subscription is an adventure as many of you will be discovering. These are the puzzling questions that set me off:
- Prices are going up. Excuse me? Which planet are these guys living on? I’m sure advertising revenues must be down, but don’t they read their own news? Forcing the issue onto subscribers may just accelerate finding out how little some of the subscriptions are needed.
- It’s a bazaar-like (and bizarro-like) negotiation. You can trade on what you’ve paid in the past, how long you’ve been paying and how many people want to read the thing. I’ve no doubt that pilfering news by sharing accounts drives these guys nuts, but customer behavior might actually be giving them useful feedback as to how to redesign their model profitably for them, their advertisers and their readers. Doesn’t the bargaining prove the current model is in decay?
- Currency exchange rates apparently mean nothing. One respectable industry publication offers a UK pound sterling basic subscription for about a thousand pounds. Choose that, because if you select the $ sign to convert to dollars the subscription balloons to $2,600. How much? Just where do they trade their currency? This is what comes from trying to cram an old physical economic model online. See #4.
- Part of the reason for Puzzling Question Number 3 is that these Luddites still insist on shipping the magazine in hard copy around the world. That particular publication offers no “online-only” subscription, probably because they’re still addicted to ad revenues in a glossy magazine. What happens to the glossy magazine in our office? Nothing. It gets thrown out without being opened. Advertisers please note – we don’t read the hard copy.
- In the steel industry press, the world is still divided into regional communities like a Risk board, so there are Latin American, North American, European, Asian editions, etc. Of course we all want to tailor our news to center around the regions and products we’re most interested in, but let us do it! There should be no boundaries in steel industry news. And does it really cost so much more to offer a global product over the regional variants? There are other value added ways to offer a range of price points. This is not one of them.
- For some time now, there has been a very convenient thing called RSS feeds that NONE of the subscriber steel industry press offers as a standard service. Help me get my news in more different forms and I’ll love you. Let me weave it with other sources so that I can get a fuller view of what’s happening. The day is past when proprietary news was proprietary enough to guard like it was hot from a single press. The AP beats them most of the time. Why can’t I work more with the content?
- And on that topic, the industry press seems oblivious to the many free and extremely efficient sources of steel news such as the many linked to on these pages. Subscription site search functions are still worse than using Google itself for steel news. So when will we get a subscription service that is truly reliable, informed, accessible, relational, value added, value for money and fully exploiting the technologies available? Don’t hold your breath.
Confronting these quaint anomalies reminds me of some of the reasons we started Nerds of Steel, which is just about a year old now, in the first place. Web 2.0 has provided some powerful communication tools that should reduce the cost to publishers for addressing vertical markets like the steel industry and the price to readers for staying informed about an increasingly complex world. Publishing and social networking tools allow the generators of the news and the information to share it and add to it between them without paying an intermediary exorbitantly for providing space.
Of course the subscription services play a vital role and they won’t disappear. We use many of their fine value added services and want to see more. But the publishers are still confused and confusing about their subscription models and they need to start working to get to the next generation of steel industry news tools. They better hurry up. If our decision making is anything to go by, they won’t all be getting renewed this year. There, that’s my rant over for another year. What’s been your experience?
On January 21, I appeared on a steel outlook panel at the inaugural AMM State of Steel conference in NY. My presentation, “The sky is falling, should we run for it,” appears below. The main point I made was that while 2009 will be a very difficult year, we should not be surprised that steel is a cyclical industry. Steel companies should remain focused on the long term and use this downturn to advance their strategic agendas.
Those of you who read my presentation to the MSCI last September might be interested, amused or even shocked at the update that I presented recently to a corporate event (see slides below).
2008 finished about 10MT shy of the forecast I made in September and therefore 2009 looks to be down at least that on the relatively modest decline I was prepared to commit to then. This time I’ve added a more severe scenario showing a 10% demand decline in 2009 from 2008. (This is still shy of the 15% declines forecast by analysts in today’s AMM.) Even under my severe scenario however, very manageable downward adjustments to producer capacity could bring utilization rates up to reasonable levels.
Being wrong about the future is an occupational hazard. As I say somewhere in the presentation, there is an old Arab proverb that runs, “A man who forecasts the future lies even if he’s right.” Sadly little danger of that, even in September.
