Pakistan slaps 24 percent anti-dumping duty on China’s steel billets

KARACHI: The government on Thursday slapped a 24.04 percent anti-dumping duty on Chinese imports of billets after imposing such duties on galvanised coil and other steel imports from China early this year.

State-run the National Tariff Commission (NTC) said the commission after investigation has finally determined that continuous casting (CC) steel billets have been imported into Pakistan at dumped prices and the domestic industry suffered material injury on significant increase in volume of dumped imports. 

“Therefore, the commission, pursuant to the powers conferred upon it under section 50 of the Act has decided to impose definitive anti-dumping duty of 24.04 percent on CC billets imported from China for a period of five years effective from 22 June 2017,” NTC said.

The commission initiated an anti-dumping investigation concerning dumping of CC billets, originating in and/or exported from China in 2015 after complaints from local steel producers Amreli Steels Limited, Agha Steel Industries Ltd and Abbas Steel Group Metals Ltd.

“The duty is a slight positive for Amreli Steels, which supplies billets on special orders and could allow it to charge slightly higher prices,” said Hamdan Altaf, an analyst at Taurus Securities Ltd. Altaf said Amreli Steels does not procure any billet and melts its own billets in-house. “However, for Mughal Steel, which procures billets locally due to its inability to melt the required amount of billets in-house on the back of power issues, the duty on billets could mean local billet melters increasing their prices as a response to reduced competition from Chinese imports leading to higher cost of purchases for Mughal.”

The equity analyst said the commission’s definitive dumping margin, expressed as percentage of weighted average adjusted export price, stands at 27.17 percent.

“The anti-dumping duty is determined on cost and freight value in ad valorem terms,” he said. “However, the duty would not be applicable non-Chinese billets, and producers who import them as inputs in products destined solely for exports.”

Currently, regulatory/custom duties on CC billets stand at 15 and 11 percent, respectively. In January, NTC imposed definitive anti-dumping duties retroactively in the range of 13.17 percent to 19.04 percent on cold rolled coils/sheets importable from China and Ukraine for five years.