On December 22, the US Department of Commerce (Commerce) announced its affirmative preliminary determinations to impose anti-dumping duties (ADs) on imports of corrosion-resistant steel products from China, India, Italy, and South Korea.

As a result, Commerce will instruct US Customs and Border Protection to begin requiring US importers to make cash deposits based on the preliminary ADs at the time of products' importation. Corrosion-resistant steel products are widely used in automobiles, appliances, and industrial equipment, and the value of imports from the four countries was almost USD1.6bn in 2014.

Commerce has calculated preliminary ADs on imports from China of 255.80 percent; from India of between 6.64 percent and 6.92 percent; from Italy of 3.11 percent; and from South Korea of between 2.99 percent and 3.51 percent.

Commerce is scheduled to announce its final determinations in these AD investigations on or about May 10, 2016. The US International Trade Commission is also expected to make its final determinations in June next year.

Commerce's preliminary AD determination for corrosion-resistant steel imports adds a further trade dispute to the large number currently being pursued in the global steel sector. Examples include disputes over imports into the United States of non-oriented electrical steel from China, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Sweden, and Taiwan; of welded line pipe from South Korea and Turkey; and of cold-rolled steel from Brazil, China, India, and Russia.

China's Ministry of Commerce is running an AD investigation into grain-oriented flat-rolled electrical steel (GOES) imported from Japan, South Korea, and the European Union (EU), while the EU has also put provisional AD duties on GOES imports from China, Japan, South Korea, US, and Russia.