Market drawing China’s steel picture on NBS’ new figures
The latest October steel output by country released by World Steel Association on November 23 still quoted China’s production at 82.5 million tonnes, or up 9.1% on year, the same as the official release by China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on November 13, while Chinese market sources have been busy doing their own calculation to understand the real picture not about 2018 but more about 2017.
The year-on-year comparison for October led to 75.66 million tonnes of crude steel output for October 2017 instead of the 72.36 million tonnes that is on the official website of NBS, Mysteel checked on the morning of November 26.
“We are aware that the NBS reviews its statistics for the past year or two and update those numbers or year-on-year comparison without a public notice, and it seems to be the case so far where steel output figures are concerned with the retrospective changes having been applied all the way back for 2017,” a Beijing-based steel analyst said on Monday.
It is rather understandable for NBS to revise the statistics given the sheer size of the country and complexity in accumulating all the numbers from provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities, but all the changes are making it hard for the analysts and researchers to track China’s steel output, the daily crude steel output for each month for the past three years, market sources commented.
A US-based steel analyst has been trying to put all the puzzles including the missing piece of the steel output by induction furnaces in the past few years until June 2017 into his China steel market analysis file, finding it hard, though, as “something still seems amiss”, according to him.
“We may only know China’s actual steel output for 2018 when we are in 2019 or even in 2020, so it is a bit frustrating,” a second Beijing-based market source said.
With China’s January-October steel output totaling 782.5 million tonnes, most of Chinese steel market sources, however, agreed on the great possibility for the country’s steel production to hit or exceed 900 million tonnes for 2018, no matter what the final year-on-year growth will be for 2018.
NBS’ official year-on-year growth for the country’s steel production for January-October is 6.4%.
Many industrial sources including the China Iron & Steel Association revised the year-on-year growth in China’s steel output for 2017 to 3% from the 5.7% that is still on the NBS website, and NBS has already revised its 2016 steel output figure to 808 million tonnes, matching the 3% year-on-year growth, Mysteel checked on the morning of November 26.
Written by Hongmei Li, li.hongmei@mysteel.com
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