The World Steel Association (worldsteel) says that global crude steel output was 128 million tonnes in February 2015, a 0.6% increase compared to February 2014, Kallanish notes. Although small, the uptick reverses the negative year-on-year growth trend seen in January.

China produced an estimated 65.0mt in the month, a decrease of -1.5% on February 2014. This was still over 50% of world output in February although this is the second successive month that the largest steelmaking nation by far has seen a fall in output.

In the EU28 total February crude steel production decreased by -1.8% y-on-y to 13.6mt. Output in Germany decreased y-on-y by -1.6% to 3.5mt. Monthly production fell heavily again y-on-y in Italy by -9.7% to 2.0mt but in France by it grew by 3.5% to reach 1.3mt. Spanish output fell however by -4.4% to 1.1mt.

US crude steel output fell in February 2015 to 6.3mt, a decrease of -7.9% compared to February 2014 whilst in Brazil crude steel production was 2.7mt, a rise of 2.3% y-on-y.

Crude steel production in Japan in February fell only slightly by -0.2% to 9.0mt whilst that of South Korea was 5.1mt, down by -4.4% from February 2014. India's estimated production grew by 5.6% y-on-y during the month to reach 6.9mt. Taiwan produced an estimated 1.8mt of crude steel in February, an on-year increase of 2.2%.

Russian production rose by 5.6% y-on-y to 5.7mt in February 2015. Troubled Ukraine’s output again slumped dramatically to 1.6mt, down a massive -33.2% y-on-y.

The worldsteel monthly crude steel capacity utilisation ratio was 73.4% in February 2015.  This was -1.7 percentage points down from that in February 2014 but 3.8 percentage points higher than in January 2015, worldsteel says.