Germany’s steel distributors sold 9.4 million tonnes of finished product in 2024, almost exactly the same tonnage as the prior year, Kallanish learns from stockists federation BDS.
The year began with nationwide inventory of 1.78mt, the lowest level since the beginning of records after the German reunification 1990. At the end of the year, the level was 4% lower, which would make the current year the one with the lowest tonnage at start since 1990.
Final sales volume at the distributors was up by only 335t versus 2023, according to the federation.
“2018 was the last good year for Germany’s stockholders,” BDS chief economist Jörg Feger comments on the statistics. “2019 heralded a weaker economic environment and structural changes” and was then followed by the disruption caused by Covid-19.
The most notable negative changes in volume are reported for pipes and fittings, which fell by 7% to 1.17mt. In comparison with the record achieved in 2008, this is 35% less, BDS notes.
Coil and sheet products lost to a lesser extent, although hot-rolled coil in particular fell 8% year-on-year, to 1.11mt. BDS believes that larger volumes were sold from mills directly to customers, skipping distributors, or from warehouses outside Germany, suggesting increasing competition from imports.
Cold-rolled strip products stayed virtually stable at 1.18mt. Surface coated coil/strip, the largest single product at 2.72mt, fell by 2.3%.
Heavy plate, also affected by competition from foreign warehouses, lost 1.7%, selling 745,000t in total.
Of long products, sections and beams fell by 1.1% to 870,000t. BDS notes this is a very low level compared with the earlier year. Inventories at the end of the year were 130,000t, down 4.4%, also setting a new record low.
On the positive side, sales of bar products rose on-year. Rebar reached 1.17mt, up 3.9%. However, this is only a slight recovery of the 19% drop seen in 2023. That was when a recession in construction activity kicked in, after the segment had flourished in prior years.
Other bar – merchant bar as well as special bar qualities (SBQ) – recovered by 1.1% to 788,000t. Of the total, SBQ accounted for 40%, more than double its proportion in prior years. The share of SBQs in the total has more than doubled since the 1990 to now 40%, BDS notes.
Due to rounding, the sum of the product groups appears higher than the total figure of 9.4mt.
Christian Koehl Germany
