Slowdown in Chinese production is holding back global economic growth

Global crude steel production for 64 countries reporting to the World Steel Association increased 1.7% year on year in July to 156.7 million tonnes. Thus, growth slowed down from 4.6% in June and 5.4% in May.

Despite a slowdown from double-digit growth, production in China continued to rise 5% in July to 85.2 million tonnes, while production in India rose just 1.7% to 9.2 million tonnes. Production in Japan and South Korea fell by 0.4% and -2.1%, respectively, to 8.4 million and 6 million tons. Notably, production in Vietnam rose 52% to 1.8 million tonnes, the fastest growth in July, with the exception of Austria, where voestalpine suspended blast furnace operations in the summer of 2018 for refurbishment. Total production in Asia rose 3.9% to 113.3 million tonnes.

EU28 production declined again in July, but only by -0.2% to 13.6 million tons. Production in Germany and Italy is estimated to have fallen by -1% and -1.2%, respectively, to 3.4 million and 2.1 million tonnes. French production fell 0.6% to 1.3 million tonnes. However, production in Spain is estimated to have increased 16% to 1.1 million tonnes. Production in Poland is estimated to have dropped by 3.6% to 780,000 tonnes.

The US increased production by 1.8% in July to 7.5 million tons, slowing due to faster growth in previous months, while production in Brazil fell 21% to 2.4 million tons.

Russian production is estimated to have declined -1.5% to 6.2 million tonnes, while Ukrainian production was confirmed by -1.7% to 1.8 million tonnes.

Meanwhile, Turkish production fell 11% to 2.9 million tons.

For antitrust reasons, worldsteel no longer produces the world's monthly capacity utilization rate. The capacity information can be found on the OECD website, worldsteel said.

Thus, global steel production in January-July increased by 4.6% year on year to 1.08 billion tons.