In his opening address at the 53rd annual meeting of worldsteel (World Steel Association) held in Monterrey, Mexico, on October 14-15, Dr. Edwin Basson, director general of worldsteel, highlighted “longer-term megatrends” that impact the steel industry and that the steel industry will have to react to. More importantly, he said, what the steel industry does will not change anything about these trends, which have a momentum of their own, adding that the steel industry’s task is to react to them and to make sure that the industry gets the best possible advantage out of them. The steel industry has to react to these trends and has to do so in all three areas of its business. For the first area which is the upstream side, Dr. Basson said that the steel industry has to make sure that it has an answer in its supply chain process to the growing questions from its customers, for example regarding whether slave labor is used in the mining industry.
In the second area of the steel business, the actual making and producing of steel, the industry needs to make sure that it can find ways to combat the allegation that the steel industry has an impact on water resources. Overall, the worldsteel director general said, the steel industry has to be seen as an industry that is taking such allegations and particularly the carbon challenge seriously and is working towards it. The industry has solutions maybe through breakthrough technologies and also hydrogen. But none of this can happen, the worldsteel director general said, unless the steel industry has access to carbon-free energy, which may happen only 20 or 30 years down the line. The question, he said, is what the steel industry can do in-between.
In the third area of the steel business, which is downstream side, the industry also has to come to terms with the impact of climate change. In this area, Dr. Basson said, the primary impact will come in the way buildings are being built, cities are developing, the way transportation is changing, and, as a supplier for all of these sectors, the steel industry has to make sure it understands what is coming, and in many cases it is being looked upon to provide solutions to these changes.
According to the worldsteel official, the first long-term challenge is climate change. The second long-term challenge is the movement of economic power from west to east, a process which is happening and which will probably continue for many years to come. Another challenge is the drift of people from the countryside into cities. These changes are different in different locations, and they also require different solutions, Basson said, but these are changes that could potentially have huge opportunities for the steel industry provided it is open to them. Furthermore, there is the process of increased digitalization and increased automation, which cannot be disregarded, that will impact everything the industry does from how it makes steel and how it transports it and to how steel products, e.g. in automotive, are changing with this changing automation.