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Writer’s remarks: 2021 is holding a personal significance to me, as this year is the 20th anniversary of me being a steel and metals industry journalist, the career that I have pursued with great passion and full of joy. To mark the special year, in the weeks to come I will interview a few in China’s steel industry who, just like me, have witnessed it evolve, for their own stories and their observations.
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We are almost two months into 2021, and the global iron ore prices have so far appeared rather resilient especially with the serious surges after the Chinese New Year holiday over February 11-17, and with the anticipation of global economic recovery and the recent booms in the steel prices in many countries including China, the worldwide ferrous community is wondering whether the history of 2020 will repeat this year.
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Writer’s remarks: 2021 is holding a personal significance to me, as this year is the 20th anniversary of me being a steel and metals industry journalist, the career that I have pursued with great passion and full of joy. To mark the special year, in the weeks to come I will interview a few in China’s steel industry that, just like me, have witnessed it evolve, for their own stories and their observations.
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Chinese steelmakers have announced intensive maintenance plans recently, and though overhauls are not uncommon during the usual winter lull in business, this year the mills are offering a variety of reasons for taking some major equipment items offline, citing everything from coke shortages to bitter cold.
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Beijing has been working quietly on carbon emission cuts for a few years but its open pledge in 2020 to peak the country’s carbon emission by 2030 and to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060 has undoubtedly imposed more pressure publicly on the steel industry, the country’s second largest carbon emission source only after the thermal coal power generation.
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Hebei, China’s top steel producing province in North China and now the new epicentre of the COVID-19 outbreak in China, has been acting swiftly by curtailing the mobility of the citizens in three of its cities – Shijiazhuang, Xingtai and Langfang, and the local authorities have been fast in blanket swaps tests on the citizens, trying to bring down the number of the new daily cases.
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No one would have expected the steelmaking raw materials prices including iron ore, coke and scrap to have attempted multi-year highs in December, a usual off season for steel consumption and production, but the year 2020 had been proven anything but normal, and many iron ore traders ended their 2020 in frustration, as iron ore prices shot up for seemingly no reason at all.
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The world’s top iron ore miners had strived to supply more to the global steel mills with those in China in particular over the July-September quarter, and yet China’s imported iron ore prices had soared to the multi-year highs for the seaborne cargoes and port inventories, clearly illustrating the country’s phenomenal growths in steel output and in turn iron ore consumption.
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China’s imports of steel semis over January-August skyrocketed ten folds on year to a total of 11.4 million tonnes, according to data from China’s General Administration of Customs (GACC), and the surge contributed greatly to China’s re-emergence as a net steel importer during June-August for the first time in over a decade.
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Last week’s news that within this year, China could release long-awaited national guidelines relating to steel scrap standards – and the possibility that this may see present restrictions on scrap imports being eased – attracted great attention in Japan, though the feeling is rather mixed from sellers and buyers.
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In late September, China’s President Xi Jinping surprised the global community by announcing a hugely ambitious plan to make the country carbon-neutral by 2060. In the three weeks since, I have received a growing number of inquiries from steel industry insiders wondering how the Chinese steel industry will adjust to the low-carbon era.
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In the first eight months of 2020, China imported more energy products such as crude oil,natural gas and coal,according to the latest statistics from the country’s General Administration of Customs published on September 7, and the slowing global economy had sent prices lower.
For crude oil, China imported 368 million tonnes
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Similar to the time shortly after the 2008-2009 financial crisis, China has again been standing alone in the global steel market in 2020, absorbing the extra iron ore from the other countries, as their steel industries have slowed down with the stalling economy in the middle of the fierce battling against the COVID-19.
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Steelmakers in Asia are displaying differing degrees of resilience against the negative impact of the COVID-19 on their businesses. It has been six months since China formally acknowledged its emergence in January, and the actual impact on the steel industry in China, Japan and Taiwan is worth looking into for the comparison of the pros and cons in their respective business models chiefly regarding steel sales.
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A quick look at how China's economy and steel market performed in the first half of 2020.
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Anna and Olivia will be discussing some of the key topics discussed during the 2020 SEAISI e-Conference, ASEAN's flagship steel industry conference.
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After ten years of struggling and little progress made in the Simandou co-development mainly between Rio Tinto and Aluminum Corporation of China Limited (Chalco), Simandou has been back to the radar in the world’s iron ore community, and coincidentally it has emerged with the re-surge in global iron ore prices in the past two years.
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After over 42 years of “opening up policy” execution since 1978, China has reignited its economic engine, trying to set up a new economic development model in Xiong’an New Area in North China’s Hebei province, just like the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone back in 1980, and the difference is that Xiong’an is not about trade, it is about eco-friendly and high-end industries and well-designed landscape with digitalization and artificial intelligence being the core elements.
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With the COVID-19 seemingly under control, air pollution control – the core task for Beijing’s “Blue Sky Safeguard” over 2018-2020 – has returned to the Chinese authorities’ radar, and coking, a top polluting industrial sector, has been requested by the authorities in Shandong and Jiangsu in East China, to continue with restricting or removing local capacities, and this has renewed the market concern over coke supply, as the measures are expected to sharply reduce regional coke availability.
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Click here for part 1 of the feature
High
steel output and stocks to persist in H2
The unsolvable
uncertainties in demand will only lead to the rises in finished steel
inventories on the zealous output, which will test the Chinese steel market
resilience in the latter half of 2020, keeping the market participants always
on their
