Brussels, 14/03/2016 (Agence Europe) - At the ninth meeting of their 'Steel Contact Group' in Beijing on Thursday 10 March, the EU and China agreed to step up their dialogue to find sustainable solutions to the global challenge of overcapacity in the steel industry, which is putting the European steel sector through the mill, particularly in view of Russian and Chinese overcapacity.
“The goal of the meeting was to discuss the ways in which sustainable solutions for the overcapacity could be found, focusing on the state of play of capacity reduction, the newly adopted capacity reduction targets, the subsidisation policies, the behaviour and financing of the state owned enterprises” in China, the world's biggest steel producer, the Commission summed up in a press release.
Talks with the Chinese administration brought “some clarifications” regarding the capacity reduction targets and concrete ways of finding solutions, but “significant work remains to be done”, the Commission added, going on to state that it had underlined the importance of “addressing trade distortions in an urgent and effective manner”.
The EU nonetheless welcomed China's willingness to find solutions to the problems of overcapacity through dialogue and through cooperating with its commercial partners. Beijing has already adopted several instruments which have been the subject of discussions within the Contact Group, the Commission states.
In addition to measures aiming to mitigate the effects of global overcapacity, the Commission is also addressing the underlying causes of the overcapacity problem with its principal partners, both bilaterally, through Steel Contact Group meetings with China, Japan, India, Russia, Turkey and the United States, and at multilateral level, in the framework of the OECD Steel Committees, where the EU intends to “actively” raise this issue. (Original version in French by Emmanuel Hagry)