World Steel’s latest figures for global crude steel production have been released and show that there has been a 2.9% decrease for January 2015 when compared to the same period last year.
Total crude steel production in January 2015 stood at 133Mt based on figures for the 65 countries reporting to the World Steel Association.
China produced 65.5Mt, down 4.7% when compared to January 2014. Japan produced 9Mt, down 4%.
In Europe, Germany produced 3.7Mt, up 0.5%; Italy produced 1.9Mt, down 11.3% and France produced 1.3Mt, down 10.6%. Spain’s crude steel production was up 11% at 1.3Mt while Turkey was down 10.4% at 2.6Mt.
In Russia, crude steel production was up by 0.4% at 6.1Mt but the Ukraine was, unsurprisingly down 25.2% at just 1.9Mt.
In the USA there was a 0.4% increase in crude steel production (7.4Mt) while in Brazil there was a 7.7% increase (3Mt).
The crude steel utilisation rate for the countries reporting to worldsteel was 72.5% (4.4 percentage points lower than 2014) and 0.4 percentage points lower than December 2014.