Latin American steel industry concludes down year

Steelmakers in Brazil, Mexico and Argentina all saw their crude steel output sink in 2019, with their production dropping from 8 percent to 10 percent year on year, according to figures released by Brussels-based WorldSteel.

In Brazil, output fell from 35.4 million metric tons in 2018 to 32.2 metric tons last year, a decline of 9 percent in South America’s largest steel producing nation.

Things were even gloomier in Argentina, where output fell 10 percent in 2019, dropping from 5.2 million metric tons in 2018 to 4.6 million metric tons last year.

Farther north in Mexico, the trend was the same. Producers in that nation made 18.6 million metric tons of steel in 2019, down 8 percent from the 20.2 million metric tons they produced in 2018.

Those three nations were the only ones in Latin America that made WordSteel’s list of the 40 largest steel producing countries in 2019.

While those three nations struggled, steelmakers in the United States produced 1.5 percent more output in 2019 compared with the year before, rising from 86.6 million metric tons in 2018 to 87.9 million metric tons last year.

China has continued to produce more than half of the world’s steel, with WorldSteel noting that “China’s share of global crude steel production increased from 50.9 percent in 2018 to 53.3 percent in 2019.”

In volume terms, that means Chinese mills produced 996.3 million metric tons of steel in 2019, nearly nine times the amount of second-largest producer India, which churned out 111.2 million metric tons last year.