Eurofer: China not alone in applying steel import pressure

Asia – Ahead of the OECD steel committee’s meeting later this month, the European steel association Eurofer has warned that the ‘explosive’ growth in exports from third countries such as Iran, India, South Korea and Turkey ‘risks undermining the progress made in deploying trade defence tools to stabilise the industry against massive dumping from China’.

Now at ‘a record high’, imports are said to account for 25% of the EU market and climbed 9% in the second half of 2016. Chinese steel imports ‘are being replaced by those from other countries’, Eurofer contends. By way of example, the organisation says Iranian exports of steel to the EU soared from 117 000 tonnes in 2012 to 1.1 million tonnes in 2016.

‘As an open market, the EU has been targeted by foreign exporters of cheap, often unfairly dumped steel,’ argues Eurofer’s director general Axel Eggert. ‘This is one of the reasons Eurofer looks to the (European) Commission to utilise the tools available to it to defend the steel industry from dumping from other countries. The point the Commission must remember is: it’s not just China.’

The rise of dumped imports from other countries represents ‘a real and growing threat to the future of the European steel industry’, he insists.