[ferro-alloys.com]  In April, crude steelmaking capacity utilisation surged to 73.6% among the 67 member countries of the World Steel Association (WSA), which is equivalent to increases of 2.5 percentage points over the same month last year and of 1.7 points over March 2017.

RecyclingInternational - In April, crude steelmaking capacity utilisation surged to 73.6% among the 67 member countries of the World Steel Association (WSA), which is equivalent to increases of 2.5 percentage points over the same month last year and of 1.7 points over March 2017.

The cumulative production total of 142.08 million tonnes was 5% or almost 7 million tonnes higher than that for April 2016, the WSA reports.

World crude steel output amounted to 550.841 million tonnes across the first four months of 2017 - thus exceeding the corresponding total for last year by 5.2%, or more than 27 million tonnes.

Ukraine was alone among the world’s leading producers in recording a crude steel output decline for this year’s January-April period (-13.8%).

Conversely, significant gains were reported elsewhere, including by Turkey (+12% to 11.806 million tonnes), India (+7.1% to 33.159 million tonnes), China (+4.6% to 273.87 million tonnes), Russia (+3.4% to 23.989 million tonnes) and the USA (+2.9% to 27.009 million tonnes).

In April, Chinese production broke new ground in totalling 72.777 million tonnes.

From the regional perspective, EU-28 crude steel output was 4.5% higher in this year’s opening four months at 56.84 million tonnes whereas double-digit percentage gains were achieved by South America (+11.5% to 13.99 million tonnes), the Middle East (+11.8% to 10.231 million tonnes) and Africa (+12.5% to 4.454 million tonnes).

• [Editor:Wang Linyan]