According to a document seen by SteelOrbis, the European Commission will impose import quotas on certain steel products for a period of 150 days starting from February 2, 2019. However, there has been no official announcement yet. SteelOrbis has learned that the import quotas will initially be in force between July 1, 2019 and June 30, 2020 and that the quota volumes will be increased by five percent for the period between July 1, 2020 and June 30, 2021.Additionally, quotas will not be imposed uniformly but will vary depending on the country for each product.
According to the notification, the European Commission (EC) has imposed a quota of 438,048 mt on cold rolled coil (CRC) imports from Turkey for the February 2, 2019-June 30, 2019 period, which will be revised to 1.11 million mt for the July 1, 2019-June 30, 2020 period, and to 1.16 million mt for the July 1, 2020-June 30, 2021 period. According to last year’s statistics, Turkey’s CRC exports to the EU in the first ten months of 2018 totaled 197,000 mt. As a result, the new quotas are unlikely to impact Turkey’s CRC exports to the EU in the coming period. On the other hand, the EU has imposed country-based quotas for its other important import CRC sources, India, South Korea, Brazil, Serbia and Ukraine. Considering the CRC imports made from these countries to the EU in the first ten months of 2018, the exports of these counties to the EU are expected to decrease by 20-50 percent during the February 2-June 30 period. The general opinion in the market is that these developments may be considered advantageous for Turkish mills as they can increase their CRC export tonnages to the EU.