The Chinese central government’s policies targeted at maintaining growth benefitted domestic steel demand to a certain extent as infrastructure investment grew 19.4%, up 4.8 percentage points on July. Electricity consumption rose 1.9% and was up 1.8 percentage points when compared with July figures.

Fixed asset investment grew 10.9% year-on-year between January and August, 0.3 percentage points slower than January to July. Infrastructure investment increased 18.4%, up 0.2 percentage points when compared to January-July.

Planned investments for newly launched projects grew 2.7%, up 0.3 percentage points from January-July, accelerating growth for four straight months. Furthermore, planned investments of all projects under construction grew 5.1%, up 0.9 percentage points when compared to January-July, and property development investment grew 3.5%, up 0.8 percentage points on the previous seven-month period.

China produced 57.61Mt of pig iron in August, down 5.1% year-on-year. It produced 66.94Mt of crude steel, down 3.5% on the year, and 94.49Mt of steel, up 0.4% on the year.

In August the daily average crude steel output was 2.15Mt, up 1.68% from July. China exported 9.73Mt of steel and imported 1.02Mt with net steel exports equivalent to 9.04Mt of crude steel. Apparent consumption of crude steel totalled 57.9Mt, down 7.4% on the year, but up 1.9% when compared with July 2015. There was a 3.5% decline in crude steel output.

Source: China Metals