Foundational & Process Industries

c. 1500 BCE · about 3,500 years ago

Hittite Anatolia produced the earliest known systematic ironworking

Controlled smelting and forging of iron tools and weapons in Bronze Age Anatolia marked the beginning of a material that would eventually displace bronze as the basis of tools, weapons and construction.

c. 300 BCE · about 2,300 years ago

South Indian metalworkers produced wootz crucible steel

High-carbon steel made in sealed crucibles was exported across the ancient world and later reworked into Damascus steel blades, making South India a centre of advanced metal production for over a thousand years.

c. 200 BCE · about 2,200 years ago

Roman engineers developed hydraulic concrete

A mixture of volcanic ash, lime and water that hardened even underwater let Rome build structures such as the Pantheon's dome, a scale of concrete construction not matched again for well over a thousand years.

1746 · 280 years ago

John Roebuck developed the lead chamber process for sulfuric acid

The process allowed the first bulk manufacture of a heavy industrial chemical, establishing sulfuric acid, still the most-produced chemical by volume worldwide, as a foundation of the wider chemical industry.

1824 · 202 years ago

Joseph Aspdin patented Portland cement

His method of firing limestone and clay together to produce a stronger, more durable hydraulic binder became the basis of the modern cement industry and, later, reinforced concrete construction.

1840 · 186 years ago

Charles Saint Lambert established modern reverberatory furnaces for copper smelting at Fundición Lambert, La Serena

Saint Lambert spearheaded early industrialisation in Chile by installing modern reverberatory furnaces for copper smelting by 1840. The venture is usually treated as an outlier ahead of the country's broader industrial onset.

mid-18th–early 19th century · 226 years ago

Britain and early industrialising economies underwent the Industrial Revolution, the first shift from agriculture to industry

The first transformation from an agricultural to an industrial economy took place between the mid-18th and early 19th century. It established the extensive reorganisation of an economy for the purpose of manufacturing, creating the basic industrial base on which later foundational industries rested.

mid-19th century · 226 years ago

Industrialising nations entered the Second Industrial Revolution with refined steam engines, electricity and rail

Changes from the mid-19th century included the refinement of the steam engine, the invention of the internal combustion engine, the harnessing of electricity and the construction of canals, railways and electric-power lines. These inputs greatly expanded the scale and reach of basic industry.

late 19th century · 226 years ago

Chile is conventionally dated as beginning industrialisation at the end of the 19th century

Setting aside Saint Lambert's enterprises as an outlier, the onset of Chilean industrialisation has often been dated to the end of the 19th century. Since the 1980s some scholars argued Chile was en route to full industrialisation before 1914, while the economist Ducoing holds that only modernisation, not industrialisation, occurred.

1856 · 170 years ago

Henry Bessemer patented a process for mass steel production

Blowing air through molten pig iron to burn off impurities cut the cost of steel dramatically and made it, rather than iron, the basic structural material of railways, ships and buildings.

1870s · 156 years ago

Chile saw sugar refineries, confectioneries and shoe and textile factories emerge

During the 1870s a range of consumer-goods industries appeared in Chile. This decade forms part of the late 19th-century onset conventionally assigned to Chilean industrialisation.

1907 · 119 years ago

Jamsetji Tata founded South Asia's first integrated steel plant

The Tata Iron and Steel Company's Jamshedpur works became a symbol of Indian industrial self-sufficiency under colonial rule and the foundation of what grew into one of the world's largest steel producers.

1913 · 113 years ago

Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch industrialised synthetic ammonia production

The Haber-Bosch process fixed atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia at industrial scale, underpinning synthetic fertiliser production that now sustains roughly half the world's population, alongside explosives manufacture.

1960s–1990s · 66 years ago

The Four Asian Tigers underwent rapid industrialisation with exceptionally high growth rates

Between the early 1960s and the 1990s Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan industrialised rapidly and sustained very high growth. By the end of the 20th century East Asia had become one of the world's most recently industrialised regions.

August 2026 · this month

Mozambique broke ground on a 220 million US dollar cement plant

Clay and Gravel Holding began construction of a cement plant in Sofala province in partnership with China Energy Overseas Investment, adding 1.2 million tonnes a year of cement and 0.95 million tonnes of clinker capacity.

• Sofala province will host five cement plants once complete

July 2026 · last month

Argentina saw cement despatches fall further

Total cement despatches dropped 8 per cent year on year to 0.8 million tonnes in July, with exports down 49 per cent, extending a decline that left year-to-date despatches 4 per cent lower at 5.5 million tonnes.

July 2026 · last month

Brazil posted higher cement sales despite a weaker construction backdrop

Cement sales rose 3 per cent year on year to 6.2 million tonnes in July, with year-to-date sales up 2 per cent to 39 million tonnes, helped by continued demand under the Minha Casa Minha Vida housing programme.

June 2026 · 2 months ago

The Middle East recorded the sharpest regional steel decline

Crude steel production across the region fell 13.4 per cent year on year in June to 4.0 million tonnes, one of the widest regional divergences in the World Steel Association's monthly data.

June 2026 · 2 months ago

India and China moved in opposite directions on steel output

India's crude steel production rose 7.1 per cent year on year to 87.0 million tonnes over the first half of 2026, while China's fell 3.0 per cent to 500.0 million tonnes, narrowing the gap between the two largest producers.

• June alone showed the same divergence

June 2026 · 2 months ago

Vietnam posted 27.5 per cent steel output growth

Crude steel production rose to 2.6 million tonnes in June, the fastest growth rate among the world's ten largest producers, as new capacity continued to come on stream.

June 2026 · 2 months ago

Africa posted the fastest crude steel growth of any region

The continent's crude steel production rose 20 per cent year on year to 2.2 million tonnes in June, well ahead of every other region tracked by the World Steel Association.

• African output held double-digit growth over the first half

April 2026 · 4 months ago

The World Steel Association forecast demand reaching 1,724 million tonnes

The association's Short Range Outlook projected global steel demand growing 0.3 per cent in 2026 before accelerating to 2.2 per cent growth in 2027, reaching 1,762 million tonnes.

January 2026 · 7 months ago

The World Steel Association found indirect steel trade rising steadily

New data on steel embedded in manufactured goods such as vehicles and machinery showed indirect exports rising 26 per cent between 2014 and 2024, to 410 million tonnes, underscoring steel's reach beyond direct trade.

2026 · this year

Rohrdorfer Zement doubled carbon capture at its pilot plant

The German cement producer expanded captured carbon dioxide volumes at its pilot facility, part of a wider push across the industry to demonstrate emissions-capture technology at commercial cement kilns.

2018 · 8 years ago

The international development community endorsed development policies such as water purification and primary education

As of 2018 the World Bank, OECD and various United Nations bodies including FAO, WHO, ILO and UNESCO backed development policies such as water purification and primary education, alongside co-operation among developing communities. This framing shifted industrial development support towards basic services and, with green industrial policy, towards technological leapfrogging to cleaner technologies.

1996 · 30 years ago

China became the world's largest crude steel producer

Rapid capacity expansion through the 1990s took China past Japan, the United States and the whole of Western Europe combined, a lead it has held ever since and which now shapes global steel prices and trade disputes.

1976 · 50 years ago

Saudi Arabia founded SABIC to build a Gulf petrochemicals industry

The state-backed company was created to convert associated gas from oil production into ammonia, methanol and plastics feedstock, establishing the Gulf as a major petrochemicals exporter within a generation.