Iran plans a 33 percent increase in steel production with the launch of four new steelworks, the daily Kayhan reported Tuesday.
Mostafa Moazenzadeh, director general of the Iranian National Steel Company (INSC), announced that four new steelworks, with output capacity of 800,000, 700,000, 600,000 and 75,000 tones for a total of 2.715 million tones per year, will start producing in March, the beginning of the Iranian new year.
Kayhan quoted Moazenzadeh as saying that "Iran produced six million tones of steel over the past 11 months. Total production for the year should be around 6.5 million tones."
This figure marks an increase of 15 percent over the previous year. The INSC chief said the country needed 1.5 million tones of imported steel this year, but "unfortunately 2.3 million tonnes had been imported."
He also referred to the drop in the price of steel on the international markets, "due to the increase in production by Japan and the Russian Federation."
"Word production this year reached a record figure of 828 million tones, more than 7.4 million tones up on the previous year," he said, adding that "the main world producers are thinking of creating an organization along similar lines to OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) to regulate steel prices on world markets."—AFP.
©--Agence France Presse 2001.
© 2001 Mena Report (www.menareport.com)
