Total apparent steel consumption over the whole year of 2018 grew by 3.3 percent, according to the Economic and Steel Market Outlook 2019-2020/Q2 2019 Report from the Economic Committee of the European Steel Association (EUROFER).
According to EUROFER, in the final quarter of 2018 domestic deliveries from EU mills to the EU market decreased by 2.1 percent compared with the same period of 2017, as a result of third-country imports growing by 16.3 percent year on year within a context of flattening steel demand growth over that timeframe. Imports amounted to 9.6 million mt and accounted for 24.7 percent of EU steel demand.
In 2018, third-country imports rose by 12.6 percent, which contrasts sharply with the 1.7 percent rise in domestic deliveries. EUROFER said that the preliminary safeguard measures imposed by the EU in July 2018 were supportive to limiting import volumes in the second half of the year compared with the extraordinary high import volumes that landed in the EU in the first half. However, the sharp year-on-year rise in the second half of the year also illustrates that the threat of deflection of tonnage due to Section 232 tariffs in the US on steel imports and market distortions due to the global overcapacity problem and other countries’ protectionist measures is still very much alive, EUROFER warned.
With reportedly relatively high inventories in the steel distribution chain at the start of 2019, EUROFER expects apparent steel consumption to fall by 0.4 percent in 2019 and to grow by 1.3 percent in 2020.