Issue 21, 2024 - This week's editorial: China pulls down global output, CCUS in spotlight

The penultimate week of May was fairly uneventful for the global steel market, which is rather surprising given China’s launch in the prior week of its most ambitious property market stimulus package so far. Although prices did initially react positively, the sentiment impact may be greater, for the time being, than the effect on fundamentals. For more, see our Asia section.

Encouragingly for those struggling to compete with Chinese steel – in other words, everyone – Chinese crude steel production fell 7% on-year in April to 85.94 million tonnes, newly-released worldsteel data shows. Along with falling Japanese and Korean output, this brought global crude steel production down 5% to 155.7mt. Even typically immovable Indian production saw growth slow to 3.6% in April.

EU crude steel output grew 1.1% on-year in April to 11.33mt, although this is based on estimated German production growth, by 6.4%, to 3.4mt. Italian output was confirmed down 10.6% to 1.7mt.

This EU tonnage would still nevertheless represent a 3% drop versus March.

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