Posted on 19 Dec 2022
The blast furnace (BF) capacity utilization rate among 247 Chinese steel mills under Mysteel's survey recovered a bit by 0.63 percentage point on week to 82.64% over December 9-15 after the prior week's dip, mainly as some steel producers had resumed operations or ramped up steel output.
The surveyed mills' daily hot metal output also edged up by 17,200 tonnes/day on week to 2.23 million t/d in total during the survey period, while their BF operational rate had gained for the second week by another 0.07 percentage point on week to 75.97% as of December 15.
Behind the improvement was that some BF mills had resumed operations or beefed up production, thanks to the firm demand from steel users and the recent bullish market sentiment following China's further optimized COVID policies, Mysteel Global noted.
Mysteel's other survey showed that the daily trading volume of construction steel comprising rebar, wire rod and bar-in-coil among the 237 Chinese trading houses under its tracking averaged 161,500 t/d over December 9-15, jumping 20,653 t/d or 14.7% from the prior week.
As a result, another eight BFs in North, East and Northwest China had been brought back on stream during the survey week after the completion of their scheduled maintenance works, a Shanghai-based market analyst shared her observation.
The 247 surveyed steelmakers' higher output also saw their daily consumption of imported iron ore edge up accordingly by 8,100 t/d on week to 2.75 million t/d in total.
By December 15, the total inventories of imported iron ore in all forms including the volumes at steelworks, port stockyards and on the water held by these surveyed mills climbed by 575,300 tonnes on week to 92.39 million tonnes. The total tonnage would be sufficient for 33.57 days of use, or 0.11 day longer than the previous survey week.
Source:Mysteel Global
