The European Commission (EC) has initiated a partial interim review of antidumping measures applicable to imports of certain hot rolled flat steel imports from one of the key Russian exporters, Severstal. The request for the launch of the trade case was filed by the European Steel Association (EUROFER) which stated that over the past couple of years the producer significantly increased its shipments to Europe and the dumping margins also increased over the 5.3 percent rate established in the original investigation. Accordingly, EUROFER said that the earlier introduced measures are no longer sufficient to regulate the imports from Severstal to the EU.
As a result, the announced case concerns the revision of the measures introduced back in 2017. Back then, the investigation involved imports from Ukraine, Russia, Brazil and Iran. The investigation of the level of dumping will cover the period from January 1, 2020 to December 31, 2020. “I do not recall a practice when there is a revision on a single company, while the previous case was a collective one. The duty might be increased or might be decreased. The period is 2020 and Severstal has been supplying large volumes to the EU, but at high prices,” a source told SteelOrbis.
In the previous investigation, Russia’s MMK received a €96.5/mt restriction, NLMK got €53.3/mt, while Severstal got the lowest rate, at €17.6/mt. In addition, Ukraine’s Metinvest was subjected to a €60.5/mt rate. As a result, of the CIS-based mills, Severstal has been the only one present in the EU HRC market. Some sources do not see anything illogical in the review. “None of the other CIS-based mills were there in sales to Europe and their rates are too high and therefore cannot be considered as an insufficient measure by EUROFER, as we see today in relation to Severstal,” a Turkish source commented.
According to the import statistics, Russia traded 1.525 million mt of HR flat steel to the EU in January-October 2020.