"Russia, Brazil and India are buying industrial assets in rich countries at a time when industrial countries are leaving manufacturing," Charles Robertson from ING Bank in London told AFP.

In the West, Robertson said, manufacturing is not considered a "value-added activity" and firms "are moving towards service economy," giving companies from emerging economies the edge.

Kamal Nath, India's Commerce and Industry Minister, agreed.

"The winds of investment flows and trade flows are changing, and this means greater integration of the global economy," Nath said in an interview with the International Herald Tribune published on Tuesday.

On last Monday, Russian steel producer Evraz announced it was buying its US competitor Oregon Steel for 2.3 billion dollars (1.8 billion euros) as a base for expansion into the US market.

The deal would place Evraz in the world's top 10 steel producers and make it Russia's number one. But the Russian firm's ambitions are by no means an exception among metals giants in emerging economies.

Brazil's Companhia Siderurgica Nacional (CSN) is currently vying with India's Tata Steel over the British steel company Corus.

The Brazilian company, which last month merged with US-based WPC, has pledged 7.8 billion euros (10.1 billion dollars) for Corus.

The acquisition would make CSN the world's fifth largest steel producer.

Meanwhile, the Russian daily Kommersant reported earlier that Severstal, Russia's second biggest steelmaker, could aspire to buying up US Steel while also merging with Russian mining companies Gazmetall and Metalloinvest.

"Evraz's bid (...) marks the start of a likely busy period of consolidation and international acquisitions by Russia's major metal producers," said Christopher Weafer, analyst at Alfa Bank in Moscow.

"A very important factor will be how local industry regulators in the US and EU view these and other proposed acquisitions," Weafer said.

Robertson explained that a major factor in the rising power of steelmakers from emerging markets has been a rise in commodity prices in recent years.

"Russia has become immensely richer thanks to the rise of oil and commodity prices, like steel. That now allows steel companies from Russia, and also from India or Brazil to spend much more money in acquisitions," Robertson said.

Rob Edwards, an expert in metals markets for the Moscow-based Renaissance Capital investment group, predicted the emergence of "more and more cross-border steel companies," like Mittal Steel.

Mittal, which is based in the Netherlands but has key assets in emerging markets such as India, recently absorbed Arcelor, the pride of Europe's metals industry.

Companies such as Mittal combine production sites in emerging countries, where raw steel production is much cheaper, with the specialised steel and marketing capacities of industrialised countries.

"In the next half decade, there may be up to five 70 to 150-million-tonne steelmakers" in the world, Peter Marcus, an analyst from the World Steel Dynamics research centre in the United States, wrote in a recent report.