Steel Products Prices North America
November 19, 2016
Global Steel Production in October and Forecast through 2017
Written by Peter Wright
The World Steel Association (WSA) released their provisional October update of global steel production on Friday with the proviso that several countries were late in reporting. When this happens they plug in the missing numbers and, based on our review of past assumptions, we believe their preliminary report is credible. We are, therefore, going ahead with this analysis because we believe it is so important to our understanding of the markets that we live in.
Production in the month of October at 136,181,000 metric tons was up by 2.4 percent from September and the three month moving average (3MMA), that we prefer as a measure, was up by 0.6 percent from September. Capacity is 2.35 billion tonnes per year and the 3MMA of capacity utilization in October was 69.6 percent. Figure 1 shows monthly production and capacity utilization since January 2000.
