ABSTRACT

For most of the twentieth century, the world's steel industry knew only one path: expansion. Led at first by the UK, the USA, and Germany, total world steel production followed a steadily rising trend in the first decades of the century, weathering destruction of capacity in the course of two global conflicts and an inter-war economic slump to return with stronger annual growth rates. After 1946 world steel output grew even more dramatically, in response to strong demand from dynamic steel-consuming sectors such as motor vehicles. From 1946 to 1974 total world steel output increased more than six-fold, from 112 to 704 m tonnes (Table 2.1). In only three years during this period was there less steel produced than in the twelve months immediately preceding - 1954, 1958, and 1971 - and in each case the drop was more than compensated for by an increase the following year. Small wonder, then, that by the end of the 1960s steel producers envisaged a prospect of enduring world production growth. One speaker at the 1973 meeting of the International Iron and Steel Institute saw the chief limiting factor on strong worldwide demand as 'the ability of the industry to produce' (quoted in Hogan 1983: 15). Clearly yet more steelmaking plant was seen to be needed. Total new capacity planned in the western world alone in 1974 amounted to 240m tonnes, with the bulk of this expansion expected to come from western Europe and south-east Asia, and smaller yet significant increases in Latin America, north America, and the Middle East (see Table 2.2). All regions of the world, it seemed, needed more steel.