TEHRAN-Iran’s annual steel ingot production is planned to increase 3.2 million tons in the current Iranian calendar year, which began on March 20, according to Iranian Mines and Mining Industries Development and Renovation Organization (IMIDRO).

IMIDRO has put the value of the projects to boost the steel ingot output in the present year at $793 million.

Iran’s major steel companies have produced over 18.5 million tons of steel ingots during the 11-month period from March 21, 2019, to February 19, 2020, registering a four-percent growth from the figure for the same period in the previous year.

Iran has defined 16 development projects in the steel sector which are aimed to boost the country’s output of steel products by 17.3 million tons in a course of five years.

These projects are for constructing production units each with the capacity of 600,000 tons, while some other projects have been also defined to set up some units with under 500,000-ton capacity that together with the 600,000-ton capacity units will add 19.1 million tons to the country’s annual steel products output.

In its latest report, the World Steel Association (WSA) has announced that Iran’s crude steel production increased by 30 percent in 2019 while the average global growth in this sector stood at 3.5 percent.

Based on the WSA report, Iran produced 31.9 million tons of the mentioned commodity during 2019 compared to the last year’s nearly 24 million tons.

In early May 2019, Washington imposed new sanctions on Iran's metals and minerals sectors in an attempt to [as the U.S. president Trump put it] “choke off the country’s largest non-petroleum related sources of export revenue".

While at the first glance [considering Trump’s comments], this might seem to be a heavy hit to Iran’s economy in the near future but a close look into the country’s export data could reveal Trump’s great miscalculations. In fact, this could even be considered a “blessing in disguise” for the country’s minerals and metal industry.

MA/MA