[National Steel Production in May 2026]

The benchmark price for premium heavy melting scrap (HMS 1&2 80:20) exported from the United States east coast to the primary Turkish import hub suffered a steep correction, dropping by $14 per metric ton week-on-week to settle at $388 per ton CFR. Trading desks confirmed that the rapid price deterioration reflects a complete freeze in forward replacement bookings by Turkish electric arc furnace (EAF) mills. Facing heavily compressed domestic and export rebar rolling margins, Mediterranean producers are actively lowering structural melting utilization rates and rejecting high-priced international raw metal inputs.

ArcelorMittal Nippon Steel India (AM/NS India) officially launched Zagnelis Protect during a specialized metal consortium in Chennai. This marks the first domestic production of a premium zinc-aluminium-magnesium (ZAM) coated steel brand tailored explicitly for the automotive sector in India. The product technology, patented by ArcelorMittal and previously available only via European manufacturing lines, addresses a major gap in the South Asian automotive supply chain, where approximately 8% to 10% of critical automotive high-strength steel grades are currently imported due to a lack of advanced local rolling infrastructure.

A specialized global steel industrial census presented by the World Steel Association (Worldsteel) at a high-level metal forum in Singapore revealed that the international transition to low-carbon metallurgy has hit a severe wall. Official project monitoring data verified that approximately 50% of all planned global green steel projects have already been postponed or put on hold. Steelmakers and industry analysts confirmed that while governments have allocated just $20 billion of the estimated $1.5 trillion in capital required to completely decarbonize the primary metals sector, uncompetitive premiums for green hydrogen are freezing multi-billion-dollar investments in direct-reduction iron (DRI) infrastructure.