EU mills take close look at rising Turkish HRC imports

European steelmakers are keenly watching the amount of Turkish product arriving in the EU-28 market with a view to possible trade measures.

Turkish hot-rolled coil (HRC) shipments to the EU rose by over 100pc on the year to just under 500,000t in January, more than half the record total of 960,000t that the region imported that month.

The ending of provisional safeguard measures on steel imports and the start of definitive measures clearly provided a window of opportunity for sellers, but EU mills and service centres were still surprised by the vertiginous climb.

Turkish HRC imports rose to 2.86mn t last year from 1.89mn t in 2017, an increase of over 50pc.

"Monitoring work on this is being conducted — as it is more generally for wider product classes and other countries — particularly in the wider context of the safeguard," European steel association Eurofer said. The association said it does not "comment on dumping measures until they are at a provisional level as doing so can affect the behaviour of market players".

"We always monitor all imports and the feasibility of trade cases and Turkey is on the radar," a mill source said.

Should Turkey's rising imports coincide with falling prices, Eurofer "will not hesitate to file a complaint", one source in Brussels said. Turkish export prices fell from $605/t fob on 10 August to $475/t fob on 4 January. Export pricing was a shade below domestic pricing for most of the fourth quarter. Turkish products were increasingly competitive in Europe as the domestic market slowed, not helped by the sharp depreciation of the lira and the loss of the US as an export market.

But this has reversed for most of this year, with EU material more competitive than rapidly climbing import offers — although Turkish quotations have moderated somewhat of late.

The EU's steel safeguard, which takes the form of a tariff-rate quota above which 25pc duties are payable, is scheduled to be reviewed from 1 July. The European Commission could theoretically set a maximum import share for a single country within the global HRC quota, as Canada has done, although this would be vehemently argued against by consumers and traders given the duties already in place on primary exporters.