TEHRAN - The latest report released by the World Steel Association (WSA) shows that Iran’s crude steel output has increased 46.7 percent in January while the global average growth rate stood at 2.1 percent, IRNA reported, citing the data released by Iranian Mines and Mining Industries Development and Renovation Organization (IMIDRO).

Based on the WSA data, Iran produced 2.895 million tons of crude steel, 46.7 percent more than last January’s 1.971 million tons.

WSA report says that the world’s 64 steel producers managed to produce 154.436 million tons of the commodity in January 2020, 2.1 percent more than last January’s 151.228 million tons.

According to the WSA report, China, India, Japan, the U.S., and Russia were the world’s top steel producers respectively.

Iran’s crude steel production increased by 30 percent in 2019 while the average global growth in this sector stood at 3.5 percent, according to the WSA’s previous report.

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

Global crude steel production stood at 1.848 billion tons in 2019.

WSA had also put Iran’s steel production at 23.648 million tons in the eleven-month period of 2019, rising 5.3 percent from 22.452 million tons in the same time span of the previous year.

Iran produced 2.13 million tons of crude steel in November 2019, which was 2.6 percent lower than 2.187 million tons of the product produced in November 2018, the same report confirmed.

Iran which stood at the 13th place in 2017 could lag behind three major steel producers in the world, namely Italy, Taiwan, and Ukraine to stand at the 10th place in 2018, despite the re-imposition of sanctions by the U.S.

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".

EF/MA