Turkish Steel Sector Tarih: 23 January 2017
Turkish steel production showed third yearly drop in 2015. On the other hand, global steel production fell for the first time in 2015 after the sharp drop during the global financial crisis in 2009. According to the World Steel Association’s data, in 2015 world crude steel production fell 2.8 % from 1.67 billion tons to 1.62 billion tons. While production dropped in all the regions, among all the 15 steelmaking countries, only India’s steel production grew. Aside from India, the other 14 steelmaking countries experienced decrease in production, however, Ukraine’s production rates suffered the most declining by -15.6%, USA followed with -10.5%. After Ukraine and USA, with -7.4 % production drop rate Turkey was the third country to have largest decline in steel production. Because of the sharp fall in production, Turkey lost its position in the world’s largest steelmaking countries list and dropped to 9th rank from 8th.
In the past years China and Asia were setting the upward production trend in the global scale, however, in 2015 they had the opposite effects on World steel production. In 2015 while total global steel production dropped by 48 million tons, crude steel production of China fell by 19 million tons Asia by 25.5 million tons. In 2015, China accounts for 49.5% of the world crude steel production.
According to Worldsteel data, global crude steel production capacity rose from 2.351 y-o-y to 2.384 billion tons in 2015. China’s crude steel production capacity, whose growth pace slowed for the last 2 years, is estimated to have increased from 1.140 billion tons to 1. 154 billion tons. According to worldsteel’s estimations, world crude steel consumption fell from 1.66 billion tons to 1.64 billion tons. The data mentioned, show that in 2015, around 750 million tons of capacity was idle throughout the world. In 2007 the surplus steel capacity was 270 million tons, however, in 2015 surplus capacity almost tripled and substantially damaged balance of the world steel industry together with the negative effects of the slowdown in the world steel consumption growth. During the last 10 years, China increased its total crude steel capacity by 172 % and in this respect accounted for around 71 % of the 1 million tons growth in the world steel capacity. As a result of the sharp growth in capacity and slowdown in consumption, Chinese surplus capacity reached 450 million tons.
After the global financial crisis in 2007, the demand declined rapidly, as a result, capacity utilization ratios of the World steel sector, started to decline from 85% and in 2009 it reached the lowest level with 68.9%. In 2014, the capacity utilization ratio which was on the recovery track, increased by 73.4%. In parallel to the production drop, capacity utilization of the world steel industry dropped from 73.4 % in 2014 to 69.7 % in 2015.