To keep with the trend of Steel related posts, the EU will apply tariffs of up to 25.2 percent for sheet, coil and strip stainless steel imports from China. This Tariff comes following a complaint by the “European steel producers association, Eurofer.” According to Eurofer, in 2013 China and Taiwan shipped in an impressive “620 million euros ($678 million) of cold-rolled stainless steel” – 17% of the overall market – into the EU and sold these goods at “unfairly low prices.”
What is interesting is that like the other articles would suggest, these numbers have tripled from 2010 to 2014. This growth has startled some in Europe especially those in the steel industry.
One of the main questions with this new tariff is, how effectively will it work? Seth Rosenfeld, a Jefferies analyst, suggests that the tariff will “not end imports from China, but were high enough to have a considerable impact.” He expects that the base prices should improve due to less undercutting by Chinese exporters.
For these Chinese companies, the tariffs have been set around 25 percent. This is hoped to increase “capacity utilization at European steelmakers to over 80 percent in 2017 from 64 percent in 2014.” It will be interesting to see how this increase affects different things in Europe: GDPs, exchange rates (i.e. the strength of the Euro), and other aspects.
Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/25/us-eu-china-steel-idUSKBN0ML0LQ20150325
As per previous comments, steel has high fixed costs so is particularly subject to price swings.
If you like history, the European Union began as the ECSC, the European Coal and Steel Community, a cartel set up in 1951 to limit cheap steel (and coal). What China faces is not something novel!
The European Union is failing to see that there is no long term economic benefit to dumping. Instead, there is a huge benefit to trade and each country producing what it has a comparative advantage on. By imposing these tariffs the EU is hurting itself the most.