Steel industry’s fortune has shifted to Asia, Africa

The global crude steel production in H12019 at 925.1 mt shows a reasonably good growth of 4.9%. As has been happening in the past, China, with an output of 492.2 mt – a growth of nearly 10% over the last year – has captured 53.2% share, marginally up from 2018. India comes second with a production of 56.9 mt, clocking a 5% rise over the last year. That Asia, with a total production of 660.2 mt (including Oceania), occupies 71.4% share of global crude steel production firmly establishes the fact that steel industry’s fortunes have now shifted from EU, CIS, NAFTA, South America to the West Asian region, Africa and Asia. An interesting fact in this story of shifting scenario concerns the production growth being observed in some of the advanced countries. USA occupies fourth position with a production of 44.4 mt, which is 5.4% rise over the last year and even exceeds India’s growth rate. We were seized with the celebrated S-Curve paradigm of per capita GDP with per capita steel consumption to firmly declare a positive correlation between the two up to a certain peak level of GDP (around $30,000/per capita).