STEEL GLUT IS POSSIBLE NEXT YEAR

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 13, Issue 87, 16 May 1949, Page 5

STEEL GLUT IS POSSIBLE NEXT YEAR

(By Reece Smith, New Zealand Kemsley Empire Journalist) London, April 24.

A steel glut may next year end the chief single hold up in major engineering projects the world over.

The glut is prophesied by some sources close to the British Iron and Steel Federation, and by some British politicians working on European recovery. Others, while modifying this optimism, agree supplies will be vastly easier. The work of catching up war-f time leeway on big construction schemes, and of making good war damage, will accelerate. The arrival of ample steel may be taken by some as marking the return of industrial normalcy. Glut predictions have two foundations—

(1) The American steel industry is campaigning to sell its products, a remarkable swingover from its 10 year history of curtly ordering buyers to line up in the queue.

(2) European steel is coming back with a rush. While world attention focuses on the considerable recovery of the spreadeagled Ruhr, the great steel furnaces of the Old World, France and Belgium have stepped up steel production rapidly. With this newly available steel coming forward there will be a diminished continental demand for British steel, which will then spread less thinly over the non-dollar area. A shortage which has inhibited building for a decade will have gone.

New Zealanders, with so much planned and so little material available, have often been told what the steel shortage means to them. In greater or less degree the same applies around the globe.

Armament demands are not reckoned to sop up a disproportionate quantity of this new steel. The American defence authorities, for one, would not tolerate the sale abroad of American steel were not their own requirements already satisfied.

No signs of a price war emerge yet. British steel masters, with painful memories of undercutting by the Hitler-subsidised Ruhr, are watching cautiously certain not disinterested urgings to back the Ruhr with American dollars and give it its head. As the steel masters are soon to be supplanted by the British state steel corporation, they are probably assured that the Government will guard the wellbeing of what is scheduled soon to be its own enterprise. For the world, this transformation in the steel situation means more homes, ships, bridges, dams, tunnels, cars.