OREANDA-NEWS. September 23, 2008. The Ministry of Industrial Policy predicts growth of steel production by 3-4% in 2009, Minister of Industrial Policy Volodymyr Novytskyi said.

At the same time, he noted that steelmaking indexes in 2008 will be a bit lower than expected, namely about 43.7 million tons against 46 million tons forecasted.

According to the minister, such a situation occurred due to drastic price reduction for steel on the world markets, which lead to problems of the Ukrainian enterprises in sales of their products. The risks on the foreign markets that may be caused by expansion of the Chinese metal products were not taken in consideration. Thus, over the last months, China supplied metal to the same markets with Ukrainian enterprises.

Besides, there is a problem of supplying the mining complex with raw materials required for steelmaking, in particular, coke, the minister noted.