10 February 2023

Ukrainian steelmakers increased steel output m-o-m, but decreased production comparing to pre-war January 2022 by 85%.

According to Ukrmetallurgprom data, in January 2023 total Ukrainian steel output made 284k tons vs. 106k tons in December and 313k tons in November. The reason of significant output decline in December were blackouts in Ukraine due to russian missile attacks. In January situation in this respect improved.

Main problem for Ukrainian steelmakers remains logistics - Ukrainian deep sea ports remain blocked for steel and iron ore export.

Production of pig iron remains less volatile vs. steel output - in the reporting month it made 240k tons (247k tons in December).

As a reminder, in 2022, Ukrainian enterprises produced 6.4 million tons of pig iron and 6.26 million tons of steel (more than half - 3.2 million tons - was produced in the first two months of the year).

From the point of view of production capacity, Ukraine lost two metallurgical plants located in occupied Mariupol - Azovstal and MMKI (in 2021, these two enterprises together produced 8.6 million tons of steel, which was about 40% of the total Ukrainian crude steel output).