China has cut steel production capacity by more than 150 million tons

On October 27, the third ministerial meeting of the Global Forum on steel overcapacity was held in Tokyo, Japan, according to the official wechat of CISA. Li Chenggang, Assistant Minister of Commerce of China, was invited to attend the meeting. According to the Chinese side, China's steel production capacity is the largest and its contribution is the most outstanding. China's participation in the forum in the spirit of sincerity and cooperation is the only country among the forum members that has set the goal of capacity reduction and has taken the initiative to take practical measures. Since 2016, China has cut its steel production capacity by more than 150 million tons, which is 114% of the global reduction in steel production capacity. To this end, only 280 thousand Chinese workers were rehoused, exceeding the total number of steel workers employed in the United States, Europe and Japan. At present, the situation of China's steel market has improved significantly, and the utilization rate of crude steel production capacity has returned to a reasonable range of more than 80%, making a great contribution to the healthy development of the global steel industry. The Chinese side stressed that China's steel production mainly meets the domestic market demand. Although China's steel production capacity and output account for half of the world, China's steel consumption is also close to half of the world.

At present, 93% of the output is used to meet the demand of the domestic market, and the steel export accounts for only 7% of the output, which does not impact the international market. The reporter of Beijing News noted that he Wenbo, Secretary of the Party committee and executive vice president of China Iron and Steel Industry Association, said publicly at a forum recently that since this year, driven by domestic demand, steel production has grown rapidly. According to statistics, steel production increased by 55 million 510 thousand tons in the first 8 months, and net exports decreased by 952 thousand tons, which means that the increment was used to meet domestic steel demand, of which 2/3 met the demand increment in the construction field. At the same time, demand support is sustainable. The Chinese side pointed out that overcapacity is a common challenge facing the world. The root cause of this round of overcapacity is the global economic recession caused by the international financial crisis in 2008 and the decline of steel demand. Overcapacity is a general, cyclical and structural problem in economic development. All parties should take an objective, historical and fair view of the problem of global steel overcapacity in the context of the financial crisis, and follow the principle of "global challenges, collective response", and jointly take measures to deal with it, which is the consensus of leaders since the G20 Hangzhou summit.