On November 14, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) announced in a structural adjustment and upgrading plan for China’s steel sector during the 13th Five-Year Plan period (2016-20) that China would achieve major progress and fundamentally eliminate overcapacity in the steel industry by 2020. Accordingly, any new steel capacity projects or any investment in steel capacity expansion projects in China will not be approved.
The MIIT stated that by 2020 China plans to eliminate 100-150 million mt of crude steel capacity and improve its steel capacity utilization rate by ten percentage points from the current 70 percent to 80 percent.