Posted on 15 Mar 2021
By March 11, the blast furnace (BF) capacity utilization rate among the 247 steel mills across China fell 1.66 percentage points on week to a new low since May 15 2020, though the rate still appeared high at 90.39%, mainly due to the ongoing curbing on steel operations in North China’s Hebei or example, according to Mysteel’s weekly survey.
These mills’ BF capacity utilization has been persisting above 92% most of the time since China restarted its economic and industrial activities in March 2020 after the hit by the COVID-19 in the first quarter of 2020.
Over March 5-11, these mills’ daily molten iron output edged down accordingly by 44,200 tonnes/day on week to 2.41 million t/d in total, and the operational rate of their furnaces declined more substantially by 2.99 percentage points on week to its nearly one-year low of 80.34%, according to Mysteel’s database.
Since mid-February after the Chinese New Year holiday, the Tangshan government in North China’s Hebei province has been imposing restrictions frequently on local steel operations to deal with poor air quality and to facilitate the “Two Sessions” in Beijing, as reported.
The latest move was on March 8 shortly after the previous round on March 3 when the local authority of Tangshan intensified the curbing efforts, affecting more sintering plants that in turn lowering output from the BFs, and by March 11, 18 BFs in 12 local steel mills had halted operations, and the average BF operational rate among the 28 local steel mills slumped by 17.1 percentage points from March 4 to 73.3%, according to Mysteel’s surveys.
Lower iron ore consumption, thus, saw the inventories of imported iron ore at the 247 mills including the volumes at plants, port stockyards and on the water reversed up by 1.56 million tonnes on week to 115.3 million tonnes by March 11, which was sufficient to for 38.65 days of consumption at these mills, or 1.33 days longer on week.
Over the same survey period, Mysteel’s smaller-scale study among 163 BF steel plants across China also showed an on-week decline of 2.72 percentage points in their BF capacity utilization to 74.08%, or also close to its one-year low, according to the database.
Source:Mysteel Global
