Overcapacity in steel is a global problem. China, as the world's largest steel producer, is the focus of this issue. To make this problem more complicated, China is expected to obtain “Market Economic Status (MES)†in December 2016 according to China’s accession protocol when it joined the World Trade Organization (WTO), which will affect its trading partners to use trade laws to combat The so-called dumping of steel products. This article provides data on the Chinese steel industry for public discussion of these issues.
Production capacity
In the past decade, China’s share of world crude steel production has steadily increased. In 2005, China's production accounted for 31% of world production; in 2015, this figure rose to 50%). During this period, China's output more than doubled, accounting for almost the entire increase in global production - 475 million tons. Since 2009, China's crude steel output has grown at an average annual rate of 6.8%, lower than the pre-crisis growth rate (13.1%) from 2006 to 2008, but still far above the world average (including China), since 2009. The starting data is only 3%.
Steel production capacity is growing more rapidly than production. In the past decade, world steel production capacity has increased by 1.017 billion tons, of which 78% (794 million tons) came from China. China's steel production capacity has tripled between 2005 and 2015. As capacity growth is faster than production, capacity utilization has declined. Since 2011, China and the world have experienced a decline in capacity utilization for four consecutive years. In the past decade, China's capacity utilization rate has been comparable to the world level, and in 2015 it was below 70%. China's capacity utilization rate was 67% in 2015, compared with 89% in 2006.
In the past decade, the industry has had a noteworthy major shift: private companies are playing a bigger role. According to the China Iron and Steel Association (CISA), in 2003 domestic private steel production, private enterprises only contributed 5%. In 2014, this figure rose to 50.36%. The production capacity is similar: in 2014, the production capacity of private enterprises accounted for more than 50% of China's total crude steel production capacity. The increasing production and capacity of private companies will bring new challenges to the reduction of China's steel production capacity in the next few years.
Since 2005, China's steel exports to the world market have increased significantly. China’s exports have more than doubled since 2011, and exports to the four major trading partners (US, EU, Japan and South Korea) have not increased significantly. Before 2009, these four major trading partners accounted for about 45% of China's steel exports. However, in 2015, their share fell to 23%. Along with such a sharp decline is the export expansion of low- and middle-income economies, mainly including the main member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and the Caribbean. In 2015, ASEAN was China's largest single steel market, accounting for about one-third of China's total steel exports. Overall, the share of exports to these four low- and middle-income regions rose from 35% in 2005 to 62% in 2015.
Capacity reduction plan
CISA's report "China's Steel Industry Development (2016)" shows that during the 12th Five-Year Plan period (2011-2015), China closed 90 million tons of scrap steel capacity, accounting for about 11% of its total capacity in 2010. However, during this period, China's steel production capacity showed a net increase of 337 million tons. If 90 million tons were not cut five years ago, China's production capacity in 2015 will be 1.29 billion tons instead of 1.2 billion tons. In order to further solve the problem of overcapacity, in February 2016, the State Council announced that China will cut 100 million to 150 million tons of crude steel production in the next five years. According to estimates by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, there will be 500,000 employees in the industry who need to be resettled.
In May 2016, the Chinese government announced a more specific short-term plan to cut excess capacity. The government is committed to reducing coal and steel production capacity owned by centrally managed state-owned enterprises by 10% between 2016 and 2017. At the same time, the Ministry of Finance announced that the government will set up a fund of 100 billion yuan ($15.3 billion) to promote capacity reduction. The fund will be used primarily to compensate and train laid-off workers. In addition to the RMB 100 billion fund, the Ministry of Finance announced that China will adopt a combination of taxation, auditing and land management policies to support mergers and acquisitions, debt restructuring and bankruptcy restructuring in the coal and steel industries, including continued export of steel. The provider provides export tax rebates.
The OECD Steel Committee is scheduled to meet on September 8-9 to discuss overcapacity. The G20 summit in Hangzhou, China, from September 4th to 5th will also discuss how to solve this problem. In past bilateral and multilateral dialogues on overcapacity in steel, Chinese officials acknowledged the existence of excess capacity, but they believe that the sluggish demand for steel products should be attributed to the slow recovery of the world economy. In their view, solving the problem of overcapacity in steel is the responsibility shared by the major producing countries. However, the United States and the European Union believe that China's overcapacity has distort global steel trade and brought unfair trade practices.
This is the focus of debate on market economy status (MES) issues. In order to prevent unfair trade from hitting the domestic steel industry, the United States and the European Union have adopted a large number of compensation measures to resist steel imports from China. MES can greatly change the calculation of tariffs on Chinese steel exporters in anti-dumping cases, because MES allows importing countries to use other market prices to determine the dumping margin, rather than using China's non-market prices. China believes that its trading partners must grant their MES status by December 2016, but the US and the EU do not agree. As a real political issue, steel trade disputes cannot be separated from the MES problem. The MES issue is unlikely to be resolved before the December 2016 deadline, which is likely to lead China to file a representation to the US and the EU to the WTO.
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