"New infrastructure" has limited direct impact on the increment of steel consumption

A sudden outbreak of covid-19 during the Spring Festival affected China's economic development and people's lives, and disrupted the production and marketing rhythm of various industries. The steel industry was also not immune.After nearly two months of fighting the nationwide war epidemic, China has made important progress in the prevention and control of the epidemic, and the situation continues to improve. At the same time, China has accumulated valuable anti-epidemic experience.In general, China's epidemic prevention and control has now entered the "second half", the production and living order has been restored at a faster pace, the tide of returning to work and production has arrived, relevant supporting policies are being intensively introduced, and the "frozen" investment and consumer demand is being released.

At the same time, "new infrastructure" has become a hot topic in the current society, and the consensus that it will become a new engine of China's economic growth is rapidly gathering momentum."New construction" is their strength in the science and technology infrastructure, this is the investment hot spots in recent years, under the catalysis of COVID - 19 outbreak, to enhance social investment, especially the recent yunnan 13 provinces (municipalities directly under the central government, autonomous regions) announced a total of nearly 34 trillion yuan of investment as a key project of the 2020 plan ", including the new infrastructure projects.

The "new infrastructure" includes the construction of 5G base stations, ultra-high voltage, intercity high-speed railway and intercity rail transit, charging piles for new energy vehicles, big data centers, artificial intelligence and industrial Internet.Among them, steel demand in big data center, artificial intelligence and industrial Internet is relatively weak. This paper will focus on the analysis of 5G base station construction, ultra-high voltage, intercity high-speed railway and intercity rail transit, and new energy vehicle charging pile, which are closely related to steel consumption.

Intercity high-speed rail and intercity rail transit

"Steel demand" will exceed 25 million tons

Steel accounts for the highest proportion in the construction of intercity high-speed railway and intercity rail transit in the "new infrastructure" and is a major steel consumer, mainly including steel for railway infrastructure, steel for passenger stations and steel for line.The types of steel used in infrastructure construction mainly include rail, rebar, wire and bridge steel.The station construction is mainly made of steel for building steel structure, including medium thickness plate, hot rolled h-beam steel, color coated plate, steel pipe and rebar steel and wire for infrastructure construction.Wire steel mainly includes wheels, axle, bearing and body steel.

At the 2019 annual work conference on transportation, li xiaopeng, minister of transport, said the railway investment will be around 800 billion yuan in 2020, roughly the same as in 2019.Rail steel consumption will not disappear due to the epidemic in 2020. Considering that the priority of railway construction will be shifted to high-speed rail and intercity rail, steel demand will increase steadily and is expected to reach more than 25 million tons.

The ultra-high voltage industry will drive steel consumption of about 2 million tons

Uhv in China refers to the voltage level of ±800 kv or above dc and 1000 kv or above ac.Among them, the transmission tower steel consumption is the largest, the main steel varieties are Angle steel, steel pipe and cold heading steel, some steel towers also use cold bending thin-wall section.The steel used for substation structure mainly involves various types of galvanized sheet, hot-dip galvanized channel steel, rebar steel and cold heading steel.The types of steel used in uhv transformers are mainly high magnetic inductance oriented silicon steel, accounting for about 35% of the transformer cost.Commonly used transmission lines are aluminum stranded wire, steel stranded wire, steel core aluminum stranded wire and aluminum coated steel stranded wire, among which the steel core aluminum stranded wire relates to high carbon steel, medium low carbon steel and stainless steel wire.

On February 7, the state grid corporation of China (sgrid) released 12 measures to fully resume the construction of projects and boost enterprises' resumption of work and production. It promoted infrastructure projects with a total investment scale of 97.8 billion yuan and purchased 19.642 billion yuan of materials after the holiday, including several uhv projects under construction, newly started and included in the preliminary work.Up to now, a number of projects, including the yuanqu pumped storage power station in shanxi, have been restarted with a total investment of 26.5 billion yuan, and a number of major projects, such as the qinghai-henan + 800 kv uhvdc project, are being fully restarted, bringing the total construction scale to 71.3 billion yuan.In early march, the state grid 2020 key work tasks clearly planned to approve 7 uhv lines and start 3 uhv lines at the minimum in 2020, and put forward the preliminary work of the sichuan-tibet railway and other power grid projects for the first time.MAO weiming, chairman of the state grid corporation of China, said that in 2020, the specific investment scale of uhv construction projects is 112.8 billion yuan, which can lead to 223.5 billion yuan of social investment, and the overall scale is nearly 500 billion yuan.

Based on the above analysis, it is estimated that the ultra-high voltage industry will drive the consumption of steel about 2 million tons in 2020.With the development of uhv engineering and the demand for weight reduction of iron tower, the demand for high-strength steel such as Q390, Q420 and Q460 will gradually increase in the future, and the demand for high-magnetic-inductive electrical steel will increase.

Consumption of steel for charging piles of new energy vehicles

About 200,000 to 300,000 tons

According to the China ev charging infrastructure promotion alliance (hereinafter referred to as the charging alliance), by the end of December 2019, the total number of public charging piles and private charging piles in China was 1.219 million, up 50.8 percent year on year.The ratio of piles to piles is about 3.4∶1, far short of the 1:1 proposed in the guidelines for the development of electric vehicle charging infrastructure (2015-2020).

The charging alliance predicts that 373,000 additional private ac charging piles will be built in 2020, bringing the number of private ac charging piles to 1.076 million, 12,000 more public charging stations and 48,000 more public charging stations.According to the new energy vehicle industry development plan (2021-2035), the sales volume of new energy vehicles will account for about 25% of the sales volume by 2025. According to the ratio of 20 million piles to 1:1 in the total number of new energy vehicles, about 18.8 million charging piles will be needed.

The shell of charging pile is mostly made of insulation materials such as plastic or composite materials, and only the vertical column or bracket is made of metal, involving aluminum alloy, stainless steel, cold-rolled plate or hot-rolled pickling plate, etc., and there are also supports in the form of welded pipes. The steel consumption of a vertical column is generally about 15kg, and the driving effect of steel demand is not large.It is estimated that the consumption of steel for charging piles of new energy vehicles will be about 200,000 tons ~ 300,000 tons in 2020.

The "steel demand" for 5G base station construction is only a few hundred thousand tons

China mobile has started the procurement of more than 230,000 5G base station equipment, and China telecom and China unicom have jointly launched the procurement plan for 250,000 5G base station related equipment, with an estimated new investment of 125 billion yuan.According to the data released by the China academy of information and communications, it is estimated that by 2025, China's cumulative investment in 5G network construction will reach 1.2 trillion yuan.5G construction will adopt the network coverage mode of "hongji station + micro-base station". Hongji station needs separate machine room and iron tower, which is large in size. Steel requirements include Angle steel, section steel and bolts for iron tower.The microbase station is small in size and USES little steel.

Due to the large investment in 5G base station, the sharing and transformation of the original base station has become a trend, and the combination with smart lamp post may become the development mode of micro base station.More than 97 percent of the 178,000 5G base stations completed in 2019 were retrofitted with existing resources, according to China tower corp.In 2020, according to the calculation of the need to build a new tower for the 5G base station of 3%~5%, the amount involved is about 4 billion yuan ~6 billion yuan, and it is estimated that the annual steel demand for the construction of 5G base station is only several hundred thousand tons.It can be seen that the construction of 5G base station will have a limited increase in steel consumption, but it will have a significant impact on China's economy and drive the rapid development of related industries, thus indirectly bringing benefits to China's steel industry.

To sum up, the "new infrastructure" has injected a shot in the arm for the current Chinese economy under the background of the impact of the epidemic on consumption and export.However, we must be clearly aware that, different from the "railway foundation" of traditional infrastructure construction, the "new infrastructure" that focuses on science and technology has a limited direct impact on the increment of steel consumption, and it is difficult to reproduce and should not reproduce the rapid growth of steel consumption in 2008.Therefore, the steel industry needs to rationally judge the steel market trend, not only to avoid pessimism lack of confidence, but also to avoid impulsive misjudgment blind investment losses.