[TheForge] Price of steel & scrap

Thu Apr 1 18:17:00 2004

I can't begin to speak to the quality of all steel produced in China but
much of it is very good product.  A lot of their steel is going for internal
use in buildings, rail roads, bridges etc.  A lot also goes into the
manufacture of products that are exported.  They also sell product, plate
and sheet, structural shapes etc. some of which is being imported into
Japan -- and the Japanese are very tough on quality requirements.  (It is
one of their ways to exclude imports.)

The Chinese have been buying some of the best in steel mill equipment for
the last 30 years.  I saw a state of the art hot rolling mill for China on
the manufactures floor in Japan in 1975.  The equipment has only gotten
better since then and most of it has come from Germany, Italy, UK and Japan
since about 1980.  (The USA hasn't made a state of the art rolling mill
since about 1980).  All of the offshore mill builders were once tied to the
leading US mill builders -- but the US builders stop working on new
developments, were happy to live off of licensing fees and then went belly
up in the 80's.  Meanwhile their "kids" in Germany, Japan, UK etc worked on
new stuff and took all of the business.  Sad story.

The Chinese also worked very hard at training technical people in their
steel industry.  At one point -- about 1989 they had 3000 engineers training
at one German mill builder that I was working with.  (They had 3000 living
in Germany for this training.)

Dave Smucker
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Andy Vida" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, April 01, 2004 1:58 PM
Subject: Re: [TheForge] Price of steel & scrap

> Question: is the quality of the steel coming out of China any good, or
> it is crap?
>
> [email protected] wrote:
> >
> > On Thursday, April 1, 2004, at 12:59  AM, Mike wrote:
> >
> > >   Now the Chinese steel industry is ramping
> > > up fast, producing something like half the world's steel.  FWIW,
> > > - Mike
> > >
> >
> > Mike, The chart that came with this article said that China's 2003
> > steel production
> > was 220.1 million metric tons. Japan is second with 110.5 and USA third
> > with 90.4.
> > China's number was a 21.1% increase over 2002. USA was -1.3% over same
> > period.
> >
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