Posted on 02 Mar 2022
Daily crude steel production among the 247 Chinese blast-furnace and 71 electric-arc-furnace steel mills under Mysteel's regular survey continued to recover in late February to reach 2.52 million tonnes/day on average, the latest data showed. This was up by another 160,000 tonnes/day or 6.8% from the previous ten days, but was still 11.6% lower compared with one year earlier.
The further recovery in steel output was mainly attributed to the fact that more domestic steel mills had resumed operations or ramped production in late February, especially the EAF steelmakers, Mysteel Global noted.
This was in line with Mysteel's other survey, which showed that capacity utilization among the 71 EAF mills under the survey recovered continuously to 43.89% over February 18-24, up for the third week by a sharp 27.93 percentage points on week, and that among the surveyed 247 BF mills also increased by 2.17 percentage points during the same period to 77.61%.
However, the recovery in steel demand was not as fast, as some end-users had to delay restarting work after the Chinese New Year holiday due to tight liquidity, Mysteel Global learned.
Mysteel's survey among the 237 Chinese steel traders across China showed that their daily trading volume of construction steel comprising rebar, wire rod and bar-in-coil averaged 121,890 t/d in late February, much higher than the 74,378 t/d over February 14-18, but still well below market expectations for this time of year.
Domestic steel prices weakened further in late February with the lackluster demand from end-users. As of February 28, China's national price of HRB400E 20mm dia rebar, for example, was assessed by Mysteel at Yuan 4,868/tonne ($771/t) including the 13% VAT, lower by Yuan 52/t from that on February 18.
For the whole month of February, daily crude steel output among the surveyed 318 steel mills came in at an average of 2.41 million t/d, down 97,900 tonnes or 3.9% on month, or lower by 13.9% on year, the survey showed.
Source:Mysteel Global
