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The Brussels-based World Steel Association (Worldsteel) has issued a report based on aggregated global trade statistics that show a significant increase in the cross-border shipment of automobiles, appliances and other steel-containing items from 2013 to 2023.
According to the group, from 2013 to 2023, indirect exports of steel for the 74 countries analyzed increased by 23 percent, and Worldsteel research shows that in 2013, 319 million tons of steel was contained in items shipped from one country to another. Eleven years later, that figure had increased by 23 percent to 392 million metric tons.
In 2023, the volume of indirect trade in steel was equivalent in volume to 95 percent of direct exports of finished and semifinished steel, according to Worldsteel.
Noting that “indirect trade in steel takes place through exports and imports of goods that contain steel,” a chart accompanying the organization’s announcement lists those goods as belonging to six categories: automotive, other transport, domestic (household) appliances, mechanical machinery, electrical equipment and “metal products.”
“To process the indirect trade in steel calculations, it is necessary to count how much steel went into producing each manufactured product, namely the steel coefficients of each product, expressed in terms of the weight of the product,” states Worldsteel, adding that in its methodology, the steel coefficient is the amount of finished steel products (in metric tons) needed to produce one ton of a manufactured product.
When gathering trade data, Worldsteel indirect adopted the Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding System (HS) of the United Nations to define traded goods in a detailed way, which involved using approximately 1,000 codes in the study.
The source of trade data used in the Worldsteel study is the UN Commodity Trade Statistics Database (UN Comtrade). The full study is available free of charge to Worldsteel members, while nonmembers can access it via the Worldsteel online bookshop $6,880.
Worldsteel also gathers steel production figures from about 70 nations and summarizes those statistics in a monthly news release.