Steelmakers in China will likely keep their production rates low in the fourth quarter of 2021 amid pollution controls and tight electricity supply even though they still seem to have a lot of "quota" left for the year, market participants say.
In the first nine months of this year, China produced 805.89 million tonnes of crude steel, according to the country's National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).
The Chinese Ministry of Industry & Information Technology (MIIT) has instructed the sector to not exceed last year's crude steel output of 1.05 billion tonnes.
Taking this into account, it means Chinese mills can produce up to 244 million tonnes of crude steel in the fourth quarter, or an average of 81 million tonnes in each of the three months.
This is much higher than
the 73.75 million tonnes that they produced in September.
But market participants are not expecting steel production rates to rise to that level.
Tight restrictions
"This year's crude steel production might be 20 million tonnes lower than last year, or even more," an industry analyst said.
"The central and local governments didn't ease the...