By Amy Lv and Lewis Jackson
BEIJING (Reuters) -China’s crude steel output in 2024 fell 1.7% from the prior year to a five-year low, official data showed on Friday, hit by a long-running property market crisis that has depressed demand.
The world’s largest steel producer manufactured 1.005 billion metric tons of crude steel last year, data from the National Bureau of Statistics showed.
Last year’s output would likely mark the final year for crude steel output above 1 billion tons in the world’s second-largest economy, analysts said, expecting output to fall below that level in 2025.
China’s steel output has been on a downtrend after peaking at 1.065 billion tons in 2020. Demand has shrunk due to a protracted downturn in the steel-intensive property sector and as Beijing mandated zero annual growth in output from 2021 to limit carbon emissions.
Steel consumption continued to slide last year with an annual fall of 4.4%, according to state-backed research house China Metallurgical Industry Planning and Research Institute.
Rising demand from the manufacturing sector, fuelled by aggressive stimulus, and robust steel exports failed to fully offset the drag from the property sector.
China’s steel exports in 2024 hit the highest level since 2015, at 110.72 million tons, inflaming global trade tensions as producers in Japan, India and elsewhere argued that a flood of cheap Chinese steel products was hurting local manufacturers.
But steel exports are expected to stay elevated this year, as an oversupply plaguing the industry is set to persist.
For December alone, output climbed 11.8% from a year earlier to 75.97 million tons.
“Steel consumption has entered the downside cycle, but we expect the falling pace to slow down this year as the government may unveil more stimulus measures,” said Zhuo Guiqiu, an analyst at broker Jinrui Futures.
Zhuo expected steel consumption to drop by between 0.7% and 3.7% in 2025 after sliding 4.6% year-on-year in 2024.
(Reporting by Amy Lv; Editing by Edmund Klamann and Sonali Paul)
