US Steel Corp asked the US Commerce Department Wednesday to impose dumping and anti-subsidy duties of as much as 90 percent on some Chinese steel-pipe imports, dealing another blow to the already hurting Chinese steel industry.
Roger Schagrin, a lawyer for the US producers, said the petition was filed with the US International Trade Commission against $400 million in imports of pipes used in chemical, petrochemical, refineries and related operations, Bloomberg reported.
"Once you give in to trade protectionism, it will only provoke more such actions," an unidentified Chinese Ministry of Commerce spokesman told the news agency.
Similar warnings were heard days ago when Obama set safeguard tariffs on Chinese tires.
"What the tire decision has done is say that the White House door is open to protectionism," Gary Hufbauer, a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, was quoted by Bloomberg as saying.
As early as April 8, US steel makers filed an anti-dumping suit to US trade officials for investigation into China-exported steel pipes.
On the same day, the European Union lumbered Chinese exporters in its preliminary rulings with provisional dumping duties for their refractory exports to the EU, according to the Xinhua News Agency.
Despite the fact that the industry makes profits in China, the EU investigation again didn't apply market economy terms to Chinese exporters, and thus miscalculated the human resource costs in their investigation, which led to the dumping verdict, according to China's International Herald Leader newspaper.
Together with the harsh low-price competition from other countries, the export of Chinese steel products could drop dramatically as much as 80 percent in 2009, the China Iron and Steel Association warned.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment