Wednesday, November 17,
ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steelmaker, is temporarily closing three blast furnaces in Europe in response to falling demand.
“It is just matching demand with production,” a spokesman for the company said on Monday.
It is to idle one blast furnace in both France and Germany, in addition to one it has already laid up in Romania. The German site mainly serves Eastern Europe, and the closure does not reflect domestic German demand, the spokesman said.
In October, ArcelorMittal said capacity utilisation dropped to 71 percent in the third quarter from 78 percent in the second, and would remain at around that level in the final three months. It also said at the time Chinese demand for steel had cooled.
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