Abstract: The steel industry is an important basic industry that provides raw materials and steel products for various sectors of the national economy. Its industrial chain covers many segments such as mining, ore dressing, sintering (pelletizing), coking, ironmaking, steelmaking, rolling, metal products, and auxiliary materials. The development level of the steel industry has always been an important symbol of a country's comprehensive national strength. Therefore, studying the development trends and characteristics of the world steel industry is of great significance for comprehensively grasping the trends of world economic development and improving China's ability to participate in the global economy. Since the beginning of the 21st century, with changes in the global economic development environment, the world steel industry has shown the following new trends and characteristics.
The steel industry is an important basic industry that provides raw materials and steel products for various sectors of the national economy. Its industrial chain covers many segments such as mining, ore dressing, sintering (pelletizing), coking, ironmaking, steelmaking, rolling, metal products, and auxiliary materials. The development level of the steel industry has always been an important symbol of a country's comprehensive national strength. Therefore, studying the development trends and characteristics of the world steel industry is of great significance for comprehensively grasping the trends of world economic development and improving China's ability to participate in the global economy. Since the beginning of the 21st century, with changes in the global economic development environment, the world steel industry has shown the following new trends and characteristics.
World steel output grew relatively rapidly. After entering the 21st century, with the acceleration of industrialization and economic development in developing countries and emerging economies, the world steel industry continued to grow rapidly, and the industrial scale continued to expand. In 2000, world steel output broke through 800 million tons. In 2004, world steel output reached 1.0548 billion tons, exceeding 1 billion tons for the first time in human history. In 2009, due to the global financial crisis, world steel output fell sharply by 7.9%. It quickly recovered afterwards and hit a new high in 2011, exceeding 1.5 billion tons, reaching 1.518 billion tons. By 2018, world steel output reached 1.809 billion tons, an increase of 1.1 times over 2000, with an average annual growth rate of 4.3%, while the average annual growth rate of world steel output in the 1980s and 1990s was less than 1%. It can be seen that the development speed of the world steel industry has accelerated significantly since the beginning of the 21st century.
Since the 21st century, there are two noteworthy phenomena in the trajectory of world steel output. First, the growth rate fluctuated greatly between years; in three years the growth rate exceeded 10%, and in three years it was negative. It can be seen that the world steel industry has achieved relatively rapid growth amid violent fluctuations since the 21st century. Second, affected by the slow recovery of the world economy, the growth rate of world steel output has slowed down significantly in recent years. During the five years from 2013 to 2018, the average annual growth rate of world steel output was only 1.8%, much lower than the average growth rate for the entire period from 2000 to 2018.
The industrial concentration of the world steel industry has increased. Since the beginning of the 21st century, with the acceleration of technological progress and economic globalization, in order to improve market competitiveness, mergers and acquisitions among world steel enterprises have continued to occur. Many steel enterprises have gradually shifted from the original competition model of going it alone to a grouping-style competition, and strategic alliances between steel enterprises have increased significantly. The two steel giants, Thyssen and Krupp, completed a merger to form ThyssenKrupp Steel. The world's largest steel company, Mittal Steel, acquired Arcelor, the world's second largest, to form ArcelorMittal, a world steel giant with a capacity of more than 100 million tons. Japan's largest steel company, Nippon Steel, and the third largest, Sumitomo Metal Industries, formally merged into Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corporation, with an annual capacity of 50 million tons, accounting for about 40% of Japan's total crude steel output. China's Baosteel and Wuhan Steel implemented a joint reorganization to form China Baowu Steel Group, and then strategically merged Magang (Maanshan Iron & Steel Group).
With the acceleration of mergers and reorganizations in the world steel industry, the industrial concentration of the world steel industry has gradually increased, entering a new round of industrial organization structure adjustment. In 2000, the world's top five steel companies (Nippon Steel, POSCO, Arbed, Usinor, and LNM Group) accounted for 13.0% of world steel output; in 2005, the top five (Arcelor Group, LNM Holdings, Nippon Steel, JPE, POSCO) rose to 17.3%; in 2010, the top five (ArcelorMittal, Hebei Iron and Steel Group, Baosteel, Wuhan Steel, Nippon Steel) rose to 18.2%; in 2017, the top five (ArcelorMittal, China Baowu Steel Group, Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal, Hebei Iron and Steel Group, POSCO) produced nearly 300 million tons in total, accounting for 17.6% of world output. From 2000 to 2017, the industrial concentration (CR5) of the world steel industry rose by more than 4 percentage points, showing an obvious trend of market concentration toward superior steel enterprises.
The development focus has gradually shifted to emerging economies. For a long time, the world steel industry was mainly concentrated in developed countries, which highly monopolized global steel supply for a considerable period. In recent years, with rapid economic development, continuous improvement of technological levels, changes in world market systems, and changing demographic structures in various regions, the center of gravity of world economic activities has shifted, the pattern of world steel production has changed significantly, and the geographical distribution of the steel industry has become more obviously spreading from west to east. The development focus of the steel industry has shifted from developed countries to developing countries, and emerging economies including China and India have gained increasing weight in the world steel landscape. From 2000 to 2018, total crude steel output in Asia increased from 332 million tons to 1.271 billion tons, and its share of world steel output rose by 31.1 percentage points. Among this, China's output increased by 6.3 times, and its share rose by 36.3 percentage points. Meanwhile, output in Europe and the United States barely grew or even experienced negative growth; the EU's share fell by 10.0 percentage points, and the U.S. share fell by 7.2 percentage points. Correspondingly, the steel industries of major developing countries and emerging economies developed rapidly, and their status in the world steel industry improved significantly, with China and India being the most prominent. From 2001 to 2018, China's crude steel output increased from 127.20 million tons to 928.30 million tons, and its share of world steel output rose from 15.0% to 51.3%, up 36.3 percentage points. India's crude steel output increased from 27.3 million tons to 106.5 million tons, and its share rose from 3.2% to 5.9%, up 2.7 percentage points.
The industry's sustainable development capacity has improved significantly. Since the beginning of the 21st century, with increasingly fierce market competition, major steel-producing countries have accelerated investment in technology and equipment. A series of new technologies, processes, equipment, and materials have been developed and applied to the steel industry, promoting the optimization of steel production processes and shifting the world steel industry gradually toward efficient, low-consumption, high-precision, continuous, intelligent, and clean production.
First, steel production processes have been significantly optimized, and efficient, continuous, compact, and intelligent processes are increasingly becoming the mainstream of the world steel industry. For example, thin slab continuous casting and rolling technology, which has advantages such as compact process flow, short production cycle, low material consumption, and high production efficiency, has been rapidly promoted worldwide since its application at Nucor's Crawfordsville plant in the United States in 1989, leading to a rapid increase in the continuous casting ratio of the world steel industry.
Second, the upgrading of steel production technology and equipment has accelerated significantly. In recent years, a large number of efficient, low-consumption, high-quality, and intelligent process equipment, such as top-bottom combined blown converters, ultra-high power DC electric arc furnaces, LF ladle refining furnaces, and high-efficiency continuous casting and rolling mills, have been promoted and applied in the world steel industry, greatly improving the level of technology and equipment. Taking China as an example, from 2003 to 2016, the number of sinter machines above 130 m² in China's key large and medium-sized steel enterprises increased from 45 to 464; blast furnaces above 3,000 m³ increased from 5 to 45; converters above 300 tons increased from 3 to 14. The upgrading of technology and equipment has been quite rapid.
Third, the technical level of ironmaking and steelmaking processes has continued to improve. In ironmaking, major steel-producing countries have actively developed and applied blast furnace longevity technology, coal-oxygen injection enhanced smelting technology, direct reduced iron and smelting reduction iron production technologies. In steelmaking, developed countries in the steel industry have developed and applied new technologies such as pretreatment of hot metal for steelmaking, automated blowing in converters, high-power melting in electric furnaces, multifunctional secondary refining and vacuum treatment of molten steel, and high-efficiency continuous casting of molten steel. Converters have achieved "negative energy" steelmaking. Due to the adoption of the above new process equipment, world rolling technology has also been raised to a new higher level, realizing automated, efficient, and high-precision rolling production, greatly reducing resource and energy consumption in the steel industry, and significantly enhancing the industry's sustainable development capacity.
World steel trade growth is weak. Since the beginning of the 21st century, world steel trade has followed world economic growth and the process of globalization, and its development trend has shown obvious characteristics of high growth in the early period and low growth later. Just like world steel production, from the beginning of the 21st century to 2007 before the international financial crisis, world steel trade maintained sustained growth. Steel product trade volume increased from 300.4 million tons in 2001 to 446.9 million tons in 2007, an increase of 48.8%, with an average annual growth rate of 6.8%. During the period from 2008 to 2017 after the international financial crisis, world steel exports not only failed to grow, but declined slightly. Among them, world steel exports saw negative growth in both 2008 and 2009, with a sharp drop of 24.8% in 2009. It is particularly noteworthy that in recent years, the weak recovery of the world economy, especially the anti-globalization movement initiated by the United States, has greatly hindered the development of world steel trade. Since 2015, the growth rate of world steel product exports has been below 3% for many consecutive years, showing a weak growth trend. From 2001 to 2017, the average annual growth rate of world steel product trade was only 2.73%, lower than the growth rate of world steel production over the same period. This reflects the reality of the slow process of world economic globalization in recent years, and also reflects that the steel industry is an endogenous industry from the perspective of industrial attributes. A large number of low-end, low-value-added steel products cannot bear the logistics costs and transaction costs of long-distance transportation in international trade, and the industrial development model of large-scale import and export is not suitable for the steel industry.