Foreign Steel Imports: Goodbye China, Hello Vietnam!

On July 28, 2015 the U.S. steel mills filed antidumping and countervailing duty trade suits on cold rolled steels against China, Brazil, Russia, India and Korea. Of the countries named, China was by far the largest exporter of cold rolled steel to the United States and the country with the biggest target on its back. For those involved with the trading of Chinese cold rolled and those buying tonnage from Chinese mills the reason was obvious – the trading companies representing the Chinese mills were willing to sell at numbers well below the prices being offered in the rest of the U.S. market.

In August, shortly after the cold rolled suits were filed, a trading company told SMU that essentially the traders brought these suits upon themselves. We were told, “If you’ve been making a living giving away Chinese materials, then yeah life should be tough, because you earned it.  There are potential replacements, but not to this scale and the ability to establish continuity with these sources depends on traders exercising some common sense.” This trader then went on to point to two countries that could potentially take up some of the slack left behind as the Chinese mills exit the U.S. market, “There are smaller countries/producers that should be able to fly under the radar, provided the usual idiot traders don’t screw it up by overdoing it (see Brazil and/or Vietnam, they’re next in line to get hammered).”