The European Steel Association (EUROFER) has reiterated that the EU’s Trade Defense Instruments’ (TDIs) capabilities must be upgraded substantially and, for this, the US must be the benchmark.
EUROFER director general Axel Eggert stated that in the US the gap until the implementation of provisional antidumping duties is only four and a half months, whereas the EU needs nine months for the same task. Mr. Eggert added that the US fully applies the calculated antidumping margin while the EU uses a lesser duty on unfair imports. In the recent case on cold rolled steel products from China, the EU measure was as low as 13 percent, instead of the calculated 60 percent that could have been applied, and the US recently applied an antidumping duty of over 265 percent on the same product, he stressed.
Accordingly, Mr. Eggert stated that EU member states should ultimately do more to push through the European Commission’s proposal on the modernization of the EU’s TDIs. This push must cover everything from the speed of implementation of trade defense measures, to the possibility of the imposition of measures that actually reflect the degree of injury, and to the lifting of the lesser duty rule among others.