Taking history as a mirror, looking back on the last financial crisis and the stock market crash, the U.S. government launched the emergency bill for economic stability, and in October 2008, the house and Senate voted to pass a 700 billion dollar rescue plan and a series of rescue measures; in November that year, China launched a "4 trillion yuan" package. However, for the overseas steel industry, this is not the end of the disaster, but just the beginning. As shown in Table 2, although the crisis started in early 2008 and gradually fermented and expanded, its impact on overseas steel production did not really begin to manifest until October of that year. Taking pig iron production as an example, it began to decline year-on-year (10.4%) from October 2008, and continued to October 2009. In the 13 months of continuous decline in pig iron production, the year-on-year drop in 9 months was more than 20%, and the year-on-year drop in 5 months was more than 30%.
From the annual perspective, in 2008, the world's crude steel production decreased by 1.3% and pig iron production by 2.7% year-on-year; overseas crude steel production excluding China decreased by 3.3% year-on-year and pig iron production by 3.9% year-on-year. In 2009, the world's crude steel production decreased by 8% year-on-year, pig iron production decreased by 3% year-on-year; overseas crude steel production excluding China decreased by 20.8% year-on-year, pig iron production decreased by 22% year-on-year.
On the contrary, for China's steel industry, 2009 can be seen as the starting point of a new round. In 2009, China's crude steel production increased by 13.5% and pig iron production by 15.8% year-on-year. The proportion of crude steel production (567 million tons) in the world's total production in that year increased from 37.6% in the previous year to 46.4%, and gradually increased to more than half in the next 10 years.
Overseas crude steel production only recovered to a level higher than that of 2007 (856.84 million tons in 2007), while pig iron production has not recovered to the level of 2007 (484.88 million tons in 2007). Compared with 2017, overseas crude steel production increased by 2% and pig iron production decreased by 6% in 2019, which also reflects the trend of decline of long process steel plants overseas.
