Italy experiences a decrease in steel production

Italy's crude steel production decreased by 5% y-o-y to 20 million tons in 2024.

According to information complied by Steelradar from data from Federacciai, Italy's crude steel production decreased by 8.8% in December compared to the same month last year. Production of long rolled products fell by 4.7%, while the downward trend in the production of flat products ended with an increase of 3.2% compared to previous years.

In the hot-rolled products category, long-rolled products remained at 2023 levels, while production of flat products fell by 9.7%.

Top year was 2018

According to the data, Italy's crude steel production reached its highest level in 2018. This year, a record production of 24.5 million tons was recorded, while the lowest production was 20 million tons in 2024. After 2018, the highest production was in 2021 with 24.4 million tons. This was followed by 2017 with 24 million tons, 2014 with 23.7 million tons, 2016 with 23.3 million tons and 2019 with 23.2 million tons. Although production amounts in other years around 22 million tons, last year marked the year with the lowest production.

Global steel production increased by 5.6% in December. This was due to strong growth in major producing countries such as China (11.8%), India (9.5%) and the European Union (7.2%). However, following contractions in recent months, global steel production for 2024 is expected to fall by 0.9% to 1.8 billion tons. Despite a 1.7% decline, China exceeded one billion tons, accounting for 55% of world production, while India increased its output by 6.3% to 149.6 million tons, ahead of the European Union. EU production increased by 2.5% to 129.5 million tons.

Italian National Institute of Statistics  (ISTAT) data showed that industrial production in Italy fell by 1.5% y-o-y in November, continuing a twenty-two-month decline. Among the steel-using sectors, the automotive sector declined by 28.5%, the mechanical sector by 6.2% and household appliances by 11.3%. In contrast, growth was observed in other means of transportation (8.7%) and construction (3.6%).