Steel blacklist questioned

China has eventually announced a name list of domestic steelmakers with outmoded facilities to be eliminated after years of just chanting slogans to remove them. In the list released this time, however, many names are not new. They have either been mentioned by local governments in their backward eradicating promises this year, or even been discarded in perpetuity. Thus, the industry as a whole is still fraught with concerns about overcapacity.

The crackdown points mainly to private producers of construction steel, along with a few state-owned and listed companies. Among the facilities belonging to big groups are a 25 t converter in Handan Steel, 300-cubic-meter blast furnace in Xuanhua Steel, two 15 t converters in Shaoguan Steel and four blast furnaces in Guangxi Liuzhou Steel.

Analysts note construction steel constitutes a large percentage both of the 30 million tons of steel capacity to be scraped this year - accounting for nearly 10 percent of the country's total supplies of construction steel - and of the 70 million tons next year.

This year China will eliminate 26 million tons of coke capacity belonging to 192 plants, making up 7 percent of total capacity.

China is expected to consume at most 280 million to 290 million tons of coke this year. This depressingly compared to the 400 million tons of capacity China registered as of the end of 2009.