POSCO : Honored as World's Most Competitive Steel Company for Eight Years Running

POSCO placed first as the world's most competitive steelmaker for the eighth consecutive year

On June 20, WSD(World Steel Dynamics), the world's leading steel industry analysis agency, announced POSCO as the world's best steelmaker in the 32nd Steel Survival Strategies in New York with the participation of as many as 650 employees from major steelmakers, major consulting companies and market research organizations.

Once again, POSCO has been recognized as the leading company among the world's steelmakers over the past eight consecutive years. Of particular note, this feat was all the more meaningful as POSCO took the honor despite facing difficult market conditions such as sluggish domestic and overseas markets which stemmed from last year's global oversupply, tighter import regulations triggered by the spread of protectionism, and restructuring to improve the company's financial structure.

The Steel Survival Strategies aimed at discussing trends in and future strategies of the world steel industry has been announcing annual rankings of steelmakers' competitiveness by evaluating 37 steel companies around the world in terms of 23 aspects such as production scale, profitability, technological innovation, price competitiveness, cost reduction, financial soundness and raw material acquisition.

POSCO has topped the list for a total of 13 times, maintaining the highest spot for the longest period since 2002 when WSD began announcing its global competitiveness rankings for the first time.

POSCO claimed the loftiest standing as the steelmaker tallied a perfect 10 points in five categories - technological innovation, cost reduction, labor skills, restructuring and investment environment - and scoring a total of 8.31 points, 0.26 points more than last year, by receiving high evaluations for the strengthening of its core competitiveness with the reinforcement of solution marketing activities and the expansion of high-value-added products, in addition to financial structure improvement activities.

Other high rankers announced on the day include Russian steelmaker Severstal (second place) with iron ore and coal mines, US steelmaker Nucor (third place), which achieved technological innovation and boosted its profitability, and NLMK (fourth place) steelmaker with iron ore, and NSSMC (fifth place), which received positive evaluations in business diversification and restructuring.