The demand scale of the Middle East steel market is expanding continuously and is in a golden period of volume growth, making it a key layout area for global steel enterprises.
In terms of the overall volume, the steel consumption in the Middle East reached 57.9 million tons in 2024, and is expected to grow by 2.8% year-on-year to 59.5 million tons in 2025. Saudi and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are the core demand countries. In the first three quarters of 2025, they imported 4.06 million tons and 4.24 million tons of steel from China respectively, with a year-on-year increase of over 10%, and the growth rate of Saudi was as high as 24.5%. The UAE performed particularly prominently: it imported 5.48 million tons of steel from China in 2024, a year-on-year increase of 46.1% compared with 2023, and its import volume surged by another 13% year-on-year in the first four months of 2025, making it China's third-largest export destination for steel products.
The huge demand stems from the upsurge in infrastructure and real estate construction. Projects related to Saudi's Vision 2030 and the expansion of Dubai Al Maktoum International Airport have spawned substantial steel demand. The expansion of Dubai Airport alone requires nearly 2 million tons of steel bars, while the construction of Egypt's New Administrative Capital has directly driven the demand for more than 5 million tons of steel.
However, the local steel production capacity in the Middle East is severely insufficient, with crude steel capacity accounting for less than 3% of the global total. More than two-thirds of the regional demand relies on imports, and the import rate of high-end steel plates exceeds 60%. Saudi's local production capacity can only meet 40% of its domestic demand, and 90% of its output is concentrated in low-end long steel products. High-end steel plates are almost entirely dependent on imports, which further expands the market space.