Account for the present location of iron and steel industries away from the source of raw material, by giving examples.

Classically, iron and steel plants clung to coalfields and ore belts — the Ruhr, Pittsburgh, Jamshedpur — because early technology consumed several tonnes of coal per tonne of steel. Modern capacity, however, increasingly locates at ports and markets, away from raw materials.

Reasons for the locational shift

• Cheap bulk transport: giant ore and coal carriers make imported inputs cheaper than inland assembly; Japan's tidewater plants around Tokyo–Yokohama and Osaka–Kobe run almost entirely on imported ore and coking coal.
• Technological change: efficiency gains have cut coal consumption per tonne of steel drastically, dissolving the gravitational pull of coalfields.
• Scrap-based mini-mills: electric arc furnaces use scrap and electricity instead of ore and coke, freeing plants to sit near markets — Nucor's mini-mills across the southern United States.
• Port-based integration: Visakhapatnam Steel Plant, POSCO's Gwangyang works in South Korea, Baoshan near Shanghai and Taranto in Italy import raw materials and ship out finished steel directly, minimizing handling costs.
• Market and agglomeration pull: proximity to automobile, shipbuilding and construction demand, skilled labour and infrastructure now outweighs nearness to mines.

Steel location has thus shifted from resource orientation to market-and-port orientation: raw materials now travel to the plant, rather than the plant migrating to the raw materials.