Brussels, 12/02/2016 (Agence Europe) - On Friday 12 February, the European Commission announced the opening of three new anti-dumping investigations targeting imports of Chinese steel products (seamless pipes, heavy plates and hot-rolled flat steel) and the imposition of provisional anti-dumping duties on cold-rolled flat steel from China and Russia.
“The European Commission today opened new anti-dumping investigations to determine whether imports of three steel products have been dumped on the EU market. If this is found to be the case, the Commission will take measures to protect the European industry from damaging effects of unfair trade”, the Commission stated on Friday with regard to the opening of the three new anti-dumping investigations targeting imports of Chinese steel products.
Two weeks after its decision to impose provisional anti-dumping duties on imports of Chinese high fatigue performance rebars (see EUROPE 11481), and a week after the alert launched by seven EU member states (see EUROPE 11485), the Commission is continuing its offensive to defend the European steel sector, which has fallen victim to dumping practices and Chinese overcapacity.
“The steel sector currently faces a range of challenges. EU trade defence instruments cannot on their own solve all those problems, but the European Commission is acting and applying the instruments at its disposal to support and ensure a level-playing field. We cannot allow unfair competition from artificially cheap imports to threaten our industry”, European Commissioner for Trade Cecilia Malmström said on Friday, adding that she was “determined to use all means possible to ensure that our trading partners play by the rules”.
And the Commission has not hesitated to innovate, as the opening of an anti-dumping investigation on hot-rolled flat steel from China was decided on the basis of a 'threat of injury' rather than waiting for such injury to materialise. “This is an early preventive action which is in itself an exceptional step in trade defence proceedings. The European Commission decided to activate this instrument since the complaint presented by the industry contained sufficient evidence to meet the legal demands”, the Commission stated.
As regards the three new investigations, the Commission will now collect information from Chinese exporters, European producers and importers, and industrial users to determine whether anti-dumping duties should be put in place in the coming months or not. The notices of initiation of these investigations will be published in the Official Journal of the EU on 13 February.
The provisional anti-dumping duties on cold-rolled flat steel range between 13.8% and 16% for Chinese companies, and between 19.8% and 26.2% for Russian ones. Thanks to an earlier registration of imports, the Commission also has the possibility to decide at a later stage to collect duties retroactively as of December 2015.
The EU now has 37 trade defence measures in force on imports of steel, whilst nine new investigations are still underway. (Original version in French by Emmanuel Hagry)