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BEIJING, February 4 (TMTPOST) —— China’s state-owned Baowu Steel Group, the world’s largest steel producer, will accelerate internationalization in 2023, according to the speech made by the chairman of the company at its 2023 annual work conference held recently.

To speed up internationalization, there will be a number of projects in the future for Baowu to fill in the blank in the global market, said Chen Dong, the chairman of the steel giant. Chen admitted that the lack of internationalization is the biggest bottleneck and obstacle to the company"s future development.

In the global market, there is still a competitiveness gap between China Baowu and other world-class companies. For example, stainless steel made in China costs nearly 2,000 yuan ($294) per ton more than that made in Indonesia. But the logistics cost of shipping products from Southeast Asia to China is only about 80-100 yuan per ton. "Without going international, the company will be faced with a greater challenge in the future."

As the world"s largest steel producer, Baowu produced 132 million tons of crude steel in 2022, up 10 percent year on year, ranking first in the world. Its operating revenue in 2022 was 1.16 trillion yuan, an increase of 19% year-on-year. The total profit reached 31.28 billion yuan, down 48.1% year-on-year. By the end of 2022, the asset-liability ratio was 55.3 percent.

As early as 2019, Chen pointed out that internationalization is the weakness of China Baowu, and that sticking to the domestic market without making changes will lead to a failure. Chen stressed in an internal meeting on July 15, 2022, that Baowu wanted to become a truly international company, to ensure that "the company achieves a major breakthrough in overseas steel base within three years, and form a global layout within ten years ".