Posted on 19 Oct 2023
China's crude steel output totalled 795.1 million tonnes over January-September, with the on-year growth slowing to 1.7% as against the 2.6% rise for the first eight months of this year, according to the latest release by the country's National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on Wednesday morning.
For September alone, China produced 82.1 million tonnes of crude steel, posting an on-year fall of 5.6%, and the daily crude steel output averaged 2.74 million tonnes/day last month, lower by another 1.8% compared with the previous month, Mysteel Global calculated based on the NBS data.
The further on-month decrease in crude steel output last month was mainly due to that more Chinese steel mills had to operate at a loss with the high- production costs, which resulted in a slowdown in their production pace, Mysteel Global learned.
Mysteel's regular survey among the country's 247 blast furnace mills under its tracking showed that only 34.2% of them could gain some profits by the end of September, falling by another 11.3 percentage points from one month before.
While China's finished steel prices increased slightly in September, the growth was swallowed up by the higher prices of steelmaking raw materials such as iron ore, Mysteel Global noted.
The national price of HRB400E 20mm dia rebar, a bellwether of domestic steel-market sentiment, was assessed by Mysteel at Yuan 3,839/tonne ($526/t) including the 13% VAT on average in September, higher by Yuan 56/t from the previous month, while Mysteel SEADEX 62% Australian Fines index jumped by $11.4/dmt on month to average $120.4/dmt CFR Qingdao.
Although domestic steel demand improved somewhat last month with the pleasant weather in most regions of China, the recovery fell short of the market expectations.
For example, the daily trading volume of construction steel comprising rebar, wire rod and bar-in-coil among the country's 237 traders under Mysteel's regular survey averaged 148,530 t/d in September, up 3,829 t/d on month, but the volume was much lower than the usual threshold of 200,000 t/d for the traditional peak consumption season over September-October.
Last month, China produced 117.8 million tonnes of finished steel, still higher by 5.5% on year, and the cumulative production for the first three quarters registered 1.03 billion tonnes, up 6.1% from the same period last year, according to the NBS data.
China's steel output over Jan-Sept
| Sept 2023 | Jan-Sept 2023 | ||
Volume (mln t) | YoY (%) | Volume (mln t) | YoY (%) | |
Crude steel | 82.11 | -5.6 | 795.07 | 1.7 |
Finished steel | 117.82 | 5.5 | 1,028.87 | 6.1 |
Pig iron | 71.54 | -3.3 | 675.16 | 2.8 |
Source: NBS
Source:Mysteel Global
