Poland’s steel consumption ‘down 7% in 2012’, association predicts

Paragraph entered by Atlantic migration, in order for SteelFirst articles to display correctly on Metal Bulletin.

Consumption is expected to be 10.3 million tonnes for the year, down from 11 million tonnes consumed in 2011, the association said in an announcement to the Polish Press Assn on Thursday January 10.

The finalised figures will be published later this month when the data for December become available.

Worsening economic conditions in the central European state, plus the completion of infrastructure preparations for the finals of the Euro 2012 football cup competition, which Poland co-hosted with Ukraine, contributed to the decreased consumption, HIPH president Romuald Talarek said.

Significant drops in the automotive sector also had an effect, Talarek added. Construction may have driven a small increase in consumption, but this was not enough to affect the country’s overall consumption for the year.

Difficult economic situations in neighbouring eurozone states Germany and Slovakia also had spill-over effects in Poland, HIPH vice president Kazimierz Kowalski told Steel First.

Poland’s predicted lower steel consumption will result in an estimated 1.5-2% decrease year-on-year in crude steel production for 2012 to 8.5 million tonnes, according to HIPH’s predictions.

Crude steel production in Poland for the first eleven months of 2012 totalled 7.8 million tonnes, down by 3.1% year-on-year from 8.05 million tonnes in 2011, according to figures from the World Steel Assn (worldsteel).

Germany saw a 4% drop year-on-year in its crude production to 39.6 million tonnes in the first eleven months of 2012, compared with almost 41.3 million tonnes, worldsteel figures show.

The Czech Republic had a significantly larger year-on-year decrease of 8.6%, however, with 4.68 million tonnes produced in the first eleven months of 2012. The 2011 figure was 5.12 million tonnes, according to worldsteel.