Over April 22-28, the blast furnace capacity utilization rate among China’s 247 steelmakers under Mysteel’s regular survey remained largely steady, reversing from the prior week’s modest decline, though it was up by merely 0.22 percentage point on week to 86.57%.
The result suggested that steel output among surveyed mills varied little on week, with many provinces and regions across China experiencing transportation disruptions amid the resurgence of COVID-19.
During the latest survey period, daily molten iron output at these 247 mills inched up accordingly by 6,000 tonnes/day on week to 2.34 million t/d in total, and their BF operational rate also increased by 1.12 percentage points on week to 80.93% as of April 28, according to Mysteel’s survey.
“A total of 11 blast furnaces had resumed operations, but another three large-sized furnaces had been pulled offline for maintenance,” a survey conductor explained.
Some mills in eastern China had resumed operations after their local coronavirus situation improved recently, with most of them being small-sized furnaces. While some mills in North China continued to hot-idle their furnaces due to limited raw material supplies amid the remaining COVID-related transportation disruptions. And this had offset the modest ramp-up of production among surveyed mills, the market watcher added.
During the same period, the daily consumption of imported iron ore among 247 sampled mills edged up accordingly by 14,300 t/d on week to 2.88 million t/d on average, Mysteel’s data showed.
As of April 28, total inventories of imported iron ore in all forms including the volumes at steelworks, port stockyards and on the water held by these 247 mills increased by 2.59 million tonnes on week to 112 million tonnes. The stocks were sufficient to last the surveyed mills for 38.9 days of use, or 0.71 day longer than the previous survey period.
Written by Lindsey Liu, liulingxian@mysteel.com
This article has been published under an exchange agreement between MySteel Global and SteelMint.
Leave a Reply