# Forecasting Steel Production in the World--Assessments Based on Shallow and Deep Neural Networks
## 2 Steel Production around the World  
There are many different types of steel. Each type has specific characteristics, such as chemical composition, heat treatments, and mechanical properties. The metals are produced according to the market needs and demands. That means supply must be adjusted according to the requirements of demand. Specific applications have appeared in the market and they require specific types of steel [22].  
It is possible to identify more than 3500 different types of steels. About 75% of them have been developed in the last 20 years. This shows the great evolution that the sector has experienced [23]. Figure 2 shows that most of the steel produced worldwide is consumed by the civil construction sector, which uses 52% of the material. This is due to the demand for bigger and better buildings, which use increasingly more steel. As countries evolve, more and more buildings and infrastructure are needed, and steel construction is also increasingly more popular for houses and warehouses, due to the small amount of labour required. Next to this sector, more than 16% of the steel produced worldwide is used in mechanical equipment, and 12% is used in the automotive industry.  
The World Steel Association report states that Asia produced 1374.9 Mt of crude steel in 2020, an increase of 1.5% compared to 2019. China, in 2020, reached 1053.0 Mt, an increase of 5.2% compared to 2019. Figure 3 shows China's share of global crude steel production increased from 53.3% in 2019 to 56.5% in 2020. In 2019, China's apparent consumption of crude steel was about 940 million tons. India's production was 99.6 million tons in 2020, down 10.6% from 2019 [25].  
Japan produced 83.2 Mt of crude steel in 2020, down 16.2% in 2019. South Korea produced 67.1 Mt, down 6.0% in 2019. The EU produced 138.8 Mt of crude steel in 2020, a reduction of 11.8% compared to 2019.  
Germany produced 35.7 Mt of crude steel in 2020, a decrease of 10.0% compared to 2019. In short, global crude steel production reached 1864.0 million tons (Mt) in the year 2020, a decrease of 0.9% compared to 2019.  
Figure 2: Annual crude steel production, per industrial consumer sector; Graph created from data taken from source [24].  
The 2009 economic crisis led to a market recession in industrial activity and the corresponding demand for steel, which remains 27% below precrisis levels. As a result, several production sites have been closed or their production has decreased, with consequeces in unemployment at the European level in recent years. Approximately 40,000 jobs were lost. Therefore, the pressure on this industry to restructure and reduce production capacity will continue to be one of the main challenges for the European industry in the short and midterm [26].  
In the time interval from 1970 to 2012, the results of the same study indicate that the consumption of steel per capita in Europe fell down up to 50%, due to the development of new materials and the corresponding replacement in some sectors. An important example is the automotive industry, wherein many parts of automobiles were replaced by lighter and cheaper parts made of plastic, aluminium, or other synthetic materials [27].  
According to studies by [28], the steel demand in most industries will peak before 2025. The total steel demand has increased from 600 Mt in 2010 to 702 Mt in 2015 and will increase to 753 Mt in 2025. From then on, gradually, it is expected to decrease to approximately 510 Mt in 2050.  
Total steel demand will only decrease by 8% in 2030 when the average useful life of buildings increases by 30%. However, this influence becomes very obvious after 2030, because a 23% reduction in steel demand is expected to happen by 2050 [28].  
Because of the need to plan production in advance, many different methods were proposed with the objective of forecasting future demand and production [29; 30; 31].