China's over 70% Construction Projects Resume Operations

China's construction industry has been steadily back to normality with the COVID-19 under control in China at least for now, as by March 16, 74.5% of the 10,449 construction projects under Mysteel's weekly monitoring had returned to operations, up 1,894 projects or 18.12 percentage points on week.

Over March 10-16, 96% of the enterprises managing the 10,449 projects had been reopened while those in Hubei had remained shut, and 64% of the workers had been back to the construction sites, and 66% of the workers had been able to resume normal working orders after the quarantine, both being over 10 percentage points higher on week.

Among the enterprises, nearly 98% of the state-owned under Beijing's direct ownership had resumed operations, slightly higher than 94% of the privately-owned enterprises.

All those projects that are back to construction have been making up for the lost time in February, and as of March 16, they were 33.8 days behind the original schedule, or one day less than the previous week.

The continuing resumption of normal operations among the construction projects has triggered some steel demand, according to a steel trader in South China's Guangdong. "Judging from our daily steel trading, about 30%-40% construction steel demand has returned," he said.

As of March 16, the trading volume of construction steel consisting of rebar, wire rod and bar-in-coil among 237 traders across China had grown to 225,663 MT/day or up another 83,309 MT/d or 58.5% on week, according to Mysteel's daily survey.

Mysteel has commenced the tracking of the over 10,000 construction projects since late February, providing the steel market with a reference regarding the downstream users' status amid battling against the pandemic.

Among China's regions, construction sites in South China had progressed the fastest in resuming normal working orders while Central China the lowest because of Hubei in the region, according to the survey.

This article has been published under an article exchange agreement between Mysteel Global and SteelMint.