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The demand for flat steel products is expected to increase in 2024, due to growth in the energy sector on the back of China’s decarbonization efforts and the country’s leading position in the shipbuilding sector, China Minmetals Economic Research Institute’s chief researcher Zuo Geng said.
Steel consumption in the energy, shipbuilding and transportation sectors is projected to rise by between 3.9% and 16% in 2024, Zuo said.
But demand for long steel products is set to remain subdued, given the poor demand outlook from the construction sector, Zuo added.
The weak demand is due to a downturn in China’s property sector and a softer push for infrastructure construction amid overhanging debt woes in the country, sources said.
Steel consumption in China’s construction sector is expected to shrink to 486 million tonnes in 2024, down by 4% from 506 million tonnes in 2023, Zuo said.
Growth performance was mixed among downstream users in China’s steel industry in 2023, with the property sector – which is the major consumer of construction steel including long products such as rebar – still struggling with a multi-year downturn amid a debt crisis.
Most of the performance indicators for China’s real estate market are negative, with investment in real estate development falling by 9.6% year on year in 2023 and dipping by 9% year on year in the first two months of 2024, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).
Meanwhile, there has been an increase in investments in the manufacturing sector in 2023, in areas like special-purpose machinery, automobiles and electrical machinery, which will in turn raise the demand for steel, Zuo said.
There is also a strong overseas demand for steel, evident from the increase in China’s exports of indirect steel like steel containing goods from sectors such as precision engineering, machinery and transportation, which could give Chinese steelmakers and traders insight into what kind of products are in demand, Zuo added.
While China’s demand for steelmaking raw materials will remain high with the country accounting for more than half of global steel capacity, China’s transition to greener equipment will require cleaner raw materials such as iron ore of a higher grade, direct reduction iron (DRI), pellets, and scrap of higher quality, Zuo said.
The spread between high-quality iron ore and cargoes of lower quality is expected to gradually widen, which will create a lot of arbitrage opportunities, Zuo added. fastmarkets.com
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