In the first half of the year, China's steel industry showed a situation of rising production and weak consumption. Tan Chengxu, president of the China Iron and Steel Industry Association, believes that since the beginning of 2023, China's economy has shown a good trend of recovery, and the steel industry has shown great resilience in development, and the overall situation remains stable. In the complex and severe market situation, the steel industry is also facing many difficulties and challenges, and the overall profit of the industry has declined year-on-year and continues to be at a low level.
Since 2023, the downstream market of China's steel industry has been weak, steel prices have fallen sharply, but the cost side has remained high, resulting in squeezed profit space, and the steel market has failed to usher in a new round of upward trend as in 2008 and 2015.
On the supply side, in the first half of the year, the production status of China's iron and steel enterprises was greatly affected by profit and loss factors. With the gradual recovery of China's economy, the steel supply side quickly rebounded, pig iron and crude steel in early April reached a relatively high level in the year, and then affected by less than expected demand and profit contraction, steel enterprises opened a large area of voluntary production reduction. After the supply decline, the contradiction between supply and demand was alleviated, and the profits of steel enterprises gradually repaired and expanded, and then began to resume production, driving the pig iron and crude steel production to bottom out.In the first half of this year, the country produced 536 million tons of crude steel, an increase of 1.30 percent . The production of pig iron reached 452 million tons, an increase of 2.70 percent . It produced 677 million tons of steel, up 4.40 percent year on year.
In terms of demand, in the first half of the year, China's steel consumption structure changed, the automotive industry in the manufacturing industry in the new energy vehicles and exports driven by better performance, the three indicators of the shipbuilding industry ranked first in the world, the sub-industries of machinery differentiation, home appliances industry cold outside the hot inside, the container industry continued to decline sharply, the real estate industry continued to slump, crude steel apparent consumption fell 1.9 percent year-on-year.
In terms of demand, in the first half of the year, China's steel consumption structure changed, the automotive industry in the manufacturing industry in the new energy vehicles and exports driven by better performance, the three indicators of the shipbuilding industry ranked first in the world, the sub-industries of machinery differentiation, home appliances industry cold outside the hot inside, the container industry continued to decline sharply, the real estate industry continued to slump, crude steel apparent consumption fell 1.9 percent year-on-year.
