Steel Strip

More than 150 workers at a North Lincolnshire steel firm are taking an extended Christmas break to help their employer stay in business.
Staff at Caparo Merchant Bar (CMB) in Scunthorpe have agreed to take a longer, partly-unpaid, holiday over the Christmas and new year period.
Workers are being supported by the Community Trade Union in an [...]

Warsaw Business Journal reported that steel giant ArcelorMittal, which controls 70% of the Polish steel production market, wants to reduce the number of its employees in the Czech Republic by around 10%. The company plans to launch a voluntary redundancy scheme there in the near future. Due [...]

A hot strip mill at a huge steel plant is to be mothballed because of "continuing poor demand", with the loss of 115 jobs, it has been announced.
Tata Steel said the temporary mothballing of the mill at its Llanwern site in Newport, will take immediate effect.
The move will lead to the loss of 115 agency [...]

Unsurprisingly, the economic uncertainty within Europe is impacting upon demand and resulting steel prices.
The most recent MEPS report sums up the situation
EU buyers are reluctant to place orders on the mills as concern over the current financial crisis is undermining business confidence. They believe that prices could go down even further and so are [...]

The World Steel Association (worldsteel) has published the 2011 edition of World Steel in Figures. It is now available on worldsteel.org.
 

2010

2009

1.

China

626.7 mmt

China

573.6 mmt

2.

Japan

109.6 mmt

Japan

87.5 mmt

3.

United States

80.5 mmt

India

63.5 mmt

4.

India

68.3 mmt

Russia

60.0 mmt

5.

Russia

66.9 mmt

United States

58.2 mmt

Total world production was 1,413.5 mmt in 2010, up from 1,230.9 [...]

Prosecutors are investigating dozens of people across 10 companies over allegations that they built a cartel to fix the price of railway steel and defraud national carrier Deutsche Bahn for hundreds of millions of euros.
According to prosecutors in Bochum and the Federal Cartel Office, the antitrust case may be among the biggest in decades with [...]

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., today announced that Platts, a division of McGraw-Hill and a leading global provider of energy, petrochemicals and metals information, has signed an agreement to acquire the Steel Business Briefing Group (the SBB Group), a privately held U.K. company and leading provider of news, pricing and analytics to the global steel market.  [...]

MEPS Report :Flat coil products prices continue to decline in northern Europe. Selling values in the Nordic countries have fallen by a greater amount than those in the rest of the continent this month, bringing them closer together. Demand is steady at a relatively low level but, inevitably, sales will slow around the summer holiday [...]

The European Union imposed tariffs as high as 71.5 percent on steel pipes from China to help EU producers including Salzgitter AG compete with cheaper imports.
The duties punish Chinese exporters such as Changshu Walsin Specialty Steel Co. for selling stainless steel seamless pipes and tubes in the EU below cost, a practice known as [...]

Thai company SSI has signed the deal over Tata Steel’s Teesside Cast Products (TCP), securing the future of the plant’s 700-strong workforce.
The sale comes a year after the Redcar plant was partially mothballed after a major contract fell through.
The transaction - which should also create hundreds of new jobs at the site - is [...]