Steel Mills

US Steel Mills File Antidumping Trade Suit Against 8 Countries

Written by John Packard

July 28, 2015

Last night (Monday, July 27th) US Steel began advising some of their customers that a cold rolled trade suit had been filed against 8 foreign countries. We have learned from other mills mentioned in the text of the USS email below, that the case is actually being filed today. Here is the full text of the US Steel email received by SMU last night (SMU Note: the USS email incorrectly names SSAB as one of the petitioners, SSAB is not part of the CR petition):

“Late today United States Steel Corporation, along with Nucor, Steel Dynamics, AK Steel, Arcelor Mittal USA, and SSAB Americas filed petitions against foreign producers of Cold-Rolled steel in eight (8) countries alleging that unfairly traded imports of certain cold-rolled steel flat products from Brazil, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Netherlands, Russia and the United Kingdom, are causing material injury to the domestic industry.

The petitions allege that producers in each of the eight countries are dumping cold-rolled steel in the U.S. market at substantial margins:

COUNTRY DUMPING MARGINS ALLEGED

Brazil 50.07 – 59.74 percent
China 265.98 percent
India  42.28 percent
Japan 82.58 percent
South Korea 93.32 – 176.13 percent
Netherlands 47.36 – 136.46 percent
Russia 69.12 – 320.45 percent
United Kingdom  47.64 – 84.34 percent

The petitions also allege that the foreign producers in Brazil, China, India, South Korea, and Russia benefit from numerous countervailable subsidies provided by their governments. The petitions identify numerous different subsidy programs in these countries that support the production of these products:

28 subsidy programs in Brazil,
46 subsidy programs in China,
47 subsidy programs in India,
45 subsidy programs in South Korea, and
14 subsidy programs in Russia.

The petitions were filed concurrently with the United States Department of Commerce (“Commerce Department”) and the United States International Trade Commission (“USITC”).  The filing is in response to large and increasing volumes of low-priced imports of cold-rolled steel from the subject countries since 2012 that have injured U.S. producers.”  

Steel Market Update (SMU) will host an exceptional panel about Trade, Dumping and other issues during our 5th Steel Summit Conference in Atlanta, Georgia on September 1st and 2nd.

John Packard

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