Even Steel, the World's Biggest Metal Market, Is Concentrated
Despite being a mature, globally traded commodity, steel's production HHI still lands in the highly concentrated band, a genuinely counterintuitive result.
Steel is the largest metal market on this site by a wide margin, roughly 1.85 billion tonnes a year, and it is easy to assume a market this large and this old must be well-diversified. The concentration number says otherwise.
Running the index on steel’s real 2024 country shares (China roughly 53%, India 8%, Japan, the United States, Russia, and South Korea each in the low single digits, with Germany, Turkey, Brazil, and Iran further back) gives an HHI of roughly 3,229, solidly in the “highly concentrated” band, a genuinely counterintuitive result for a commodity most people would assume is too large and too globally traded to concentrate this way.
Why scale alone did not prevent concentration
China’s steel capacity grew to match its own enormous construction and manufacturing boom over recent decades, covered on this material’s application-wise page, producing a single-country scale that happens to also dominate the global total, not a deliberate attempt to corner the market. This is a capacity-scale story more than a chokepoint story, closer to aluminium’s smelting concentration, covered on aluminium’s economics page, than to cobalt’s geological lock-in.
Sources: production shares reference this project’s own published production data (worldsteel); HHI is computed directly from that data; the 2,500 HHI threshold is the US Department of Justice/FTC Horizontal Merger Guidelines convention.