The EU’s total steel exports fell four percent year on year over the first eight months of 2015, according to the Economic and Steel Market Outlook 2015-2016/Q4 2015 Report from the Economic Committee of the European Steel Association (EUROFER).
EUROFER said that, as in the recent past, EU long steel product exports are dominated by rebar, wire rod and beams. The key destination for EU exports of long products remained Algeria. Other export destinations are Switzerland, the United States, Canada and Turkey.
According to EUROFER, the outlook for 2016 is for a rather small increase in EU exports. Since 2011 exports have fluctuated in a fairly narrow bandwidth. Exports in the 2016 look set to remain within the same bandwidth. The sideways trend of annual export volumes to third countries reflects rather difficult business conditions in most export markets, particularly those for commodity products which suffer from immense price pressure.
EURFOER expects EU exports to increase by 2.5 percent year on year in 2016.