TEHRAN - Head of Iranian Steel Producers Association Rasul Khalifeh has said that the country’s largest steelmaker, Mobarakeh Steel Company (MSC), has reported a record annual output of more than 10 million metric tons (mt) of semi-finished casting products which include ingots, blooms, billets, and slabs.
The output reported by Mobarakeh Steel Company for the calendar year to late March is worth nearly $7 billion considering the current steel prices in international markets, according to Khalifeh.
Khalifeh said MSC’s increased production of semi-finished steel led to higher output in Iran’s domestic car manufacturing sector as well as in the country’s construction and packaging industries in the year to late March.
“If these manufacturers wanted to rely on imported steel, such levels of increased output would have never been possible,” he was quoted as saying by Donya-ye-Ma’dan, a website focused on the Iranian mining and metals sector.
Latest figures by World Steel Association show that Iran produced a total of 2.7 million mt of raw steel in January, up 27.7% from the same month in 2022.
Steelmakers in Iran have been posting record output figures since mid-summer last year after they received increased number of orders from European customers and amid a global crunch for steel that has been caused by the war in Ukraine.
Iran has introduced various measures to expand its mining and metals sector since 2018 when the country’s direct oil exports came under American sanctions.