Main Steel Products Steels, applications and production routes

Global steel production in 2014 has doubled since 2000. This is the result of changes in the global economy, where economic leadership, measured by GDP levels and growth, has shifted from the triad (Western Europe, North America, Japan) to emerging countries. Although a cycle seems to have been reached with the end of China's double-digit growth and the probable reorientation of its economy towards domestic consumption, forecasts for 2050 still point to a further doubling of world production.

Steel consumption remains an important marker of economic health, globally, by country or by region of the world. This is true of emerging countries, where steel is used to build the infrastructure of a modern nation, of developing countries aspiring to this emergence, but also of developed countries, where steel is used to maintain and modernize infrastructures and produce most of the consumer goods in which it is used.

Steel products are a mixture of commodities and specialties, to adopt a typology linked to the sector's economy: this distinction fluctuates, insofar as applications move in and out of these categories over time, with manufacturers constantly renewing their offer by first passing through the speciality box. This means, however, that cost price and cost control are essential in a globalized and highly competitive market, but also that products are often service products, tailor-made with users for highly targeted and individualized applications. To give two examples, concrete reinforcing bars tend to be commodities, while flat steels for the automotive industry tend to be specialties.

Steel products translate the complexity of iron and steel metallurgy into a commercial offering, and it's through such scientific decoding that steels are presented in a metallurgy course. However, they are also closely linked to the industries that produce them, such as the integrated or electrical industries (see below), and they are distinguished by the markets they serve, and therefore by the functions they perform as product-services. Traditionally, products are also distinguished according to their cross-section, i.e. flat products and long products.

Added to this are the business models of steel companies, which can either adopt a "supermarket logic", i.e. offer an almost complete range of steel products to an eclectic customer base, or, on the contrary, offer only niche specialties: for example, ArcelorMittal, a generalist steelmaker, falls into the former category, while Dillinger Hütte, a plate producer, is in the latter. The mergers that took place at the beginning of the 21st century (formation of CORUS, merger of Arcelor and Mittal, NKK and KSC, Nippon Steel and Sumitomo Metals, CORUS and Tata Steel) favored the first...