Posted on 08 Feb 2017
The United States again finished fourth internationally in steel production, according to the World Steel Association.
U.S. steelmakers produced an estimated 78.6 million tons of steel in 2016, down 0.3 percent from the 78.8 million tons made in America the previous year, the trade association found. The United States trailed China, which made 808.4 million tons, or about 250 million tons more than the next nine biggest steel-producing countries combined.
China, which had been importing a significant amount of steel from the United States as recently as the mid-2000s, now makes more than 10 times as much steel as America.
The United States placed fourth internationally for the second straight year after losing its third-place ranking to India in 2014. India made 95.6 million tons of steel last year, a 7.4 percent increase, while Japan came in second with 104.8 million tons, a 0.3 percent year-over-year decline.
America once made 37 percent of the steel in the world, but only produced 4.8 percent of the world's steel last year, down from 4.9 percent in 2015, according to the World Steel Association. China made 49.4 percent of the world's steel.
The United States still led the world in steel production as recently as the late 1960s, but its steel industry underwent a decade of painful contraction in the 1970s and lost its top spot globally to Japan by 1980.
