EU Imposes Anti-Dumping Measures on China’s Seamless Stainless Steel Pipes, Affects on Domestic Companies Limited

SHANGHAI, Jul.4 (SMM) – The European Union made a preliminary verdict of anti-dumping for China’s seamless stainless steel pipes, imposing provisionary anti-dumping duties of 48%-71.5% on involved companies. But professional industrial person said this behavior will have limited affects as China’s exports of this type of products to EU were not in a large amount.

Zhejiang Jiuli Hi-Tech Metals Company is typical among the involved companies. The notification revealed that this company’s products were imposed on provisional anti-dumping duties of 56.6%. From July 1st 2009 to June 30th 2010, the company’s sales revenue from seamless pipe product exports to EU were about RMB 18 million, accounting for only 1.10% of its total turnover during this period. In the notification released on October 8th 2010, the company explicated that the anti-dumping duties will not have great effects on its future production and operation.

According to incomplete statistics, China exported 20 kt of seamless stainless steel pipes to EU in 2010, which was 13% of the overall exports of this type of productions in 2010. Products with the following HS Code are involved in the anti-dumping duties: 73041100、73042200、73042400、73044910, all of them are high-end seamless stainless steel pipe productions.

EU will make the final decisions within 6 months as to weather to turn the provisional anti-dumping duty to a 5-year one.

An industrial researcher expressed, “To be frank, despite the high anti-dumping duty, it cast limited effects on domestic mills, due not only to China’s small exports, but also due to outdated technology and quality compared with Japan, which means China’s this type of products have very low market awareness and only a small market shares.” High-end seamless steel pipes are mainly applied in establishment of petroleum oil exploration and nuclear power station, and Japan’s Sumitomo Corp has over 95% of market share on oil exploration.

Some market analysts believed EU’s behavior is only to probe response from the Chinese government. Along with Greek’s austerity measures and eased European debt crisis, the EU will strengthen assistance on local enterprises in more fields, in a bid to boost economic recovery and delay breakout of the debt crisis. 

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