Turkey to ask US for exclusion from steel pipe antidumping case

25/07/2013 12:00 - 429 Views

Today’s Zaman reported that Turkish steel pipe makers will demand their exclusion from investigations at a hearing at the US Trade Department over an antidumping case against imports before it hurts sales.

A group of US companies that produce specialty steel pipes or oil country tubular goods used to drill for oil and gas have launched one of the biggest steel trade cases in years, asking the US International Trade Commission to stem what they say is a flood of unfairly traded products from nine countries, including Turkey.

US steel manufacturers said that foreign manufacturers sell steel pipes at prices below the cost of production a practice known as dumping and benefit from massive government subsidies. Other countries included in the complaint list are India, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Ukraine and Vietnam.

Mr Mehmet Zeren president of the Istanbul based Turkish Steel Pipe Manufacturers' Association said that the union will try its best to explain to US buyers that Turkish products have no involvement in dumping. Turkey is the only country among these nine countries that does not send end products to the US. Turkish steel pipes sent to the US have to go through a final process by local developers before they can be used. Turkish products are not subsidized.

US manufacturers want tariffs eventually placed on these imports to offset the alleged subsidies. In a similar case in 2009, US producers won duties averaging 86% on Chinese oil and gas pipes. Turkey faced a similar case with the EU last year but the investigation was dropped after European producers gave up their complaints in March.

Turkey is expecting to increase steel pipe production and exports this year over 2012. Last year, the country produced 4.25 million tonnes of steel pipe and exported 43% of it. Turkey sells almost all of its OCTG production to the US. A total of 122,669 tonnes of OCTG were sold to the US in 2012. This number was 33,165 tonnes in the first 5 months of this year.

Large exporters of steel pipe to the US like Japan and Canada are exempt from Tuesday's hearing. Turkish goods have a 4% share in US steel pipe imports, while South Korea and Vietnam have 25 and 8 percent shares respectively.

The US Trade Department could start investigating several steel pipe exporters to the country should Tuesday's hearing ask them to do so. This will mean an automatic decline in sales of the countries involved in the investigation.

Mr Zeren said that it is not clear how long the investigations into whether foreign mills are dumping steel pipes on the US market will take. This could cost us as much as 30% decline in sales to the US however, that there are currently no cuts in sales since the deals had been made earlier for the long term.

Source: Todayszaman.com