South African steel group Iscor on Friday welcomed the lifting of United States tariffs on imported steel and didn’t expect the change to threaten the group’s niche steel product exports into the US, Iscor’s head of corporate affairs Phaldie Kalam said.
On Thursday, US President George Bush ended the US steel tariffs after 21 months to avoid an impending trade war with the European Union.
“The end of the tariffs is an important step in normalising international trade relations. The lifting of trade barriers will go a long way towards restating the goal of a seamless global trading environment,” Kalam added.
Iscor’s steel exports to the US don’t face a new threat as a result of the ending of the tariffs, as they are high-value products, which are exported into niche markets where the group is firmly entrenched, he added.
At present, 4% or 100 000 tons of Iscor’s total annual sales are exported to the US, which is a negligible amount when compared with total US steel consumption.
“Since South African steel exports to the US are exempt from section 201 safeguard measures, because of the country’s developing nation status, we have continued to trade with the US without major obstructions,” he added.
However, during the imposition of the tariffs South Africa had to ensure that, as a country, it remained below the stipulated thresholds to avoid individual US steel producers instituting anti-dumping charges.
The decision to impose safeguard measures was a political one and required the US administration to show a strong political will to normalise trade relationships with its key trading partners, Kalam said.
“While we have empathy with the situation that the US steel manufacturers find themselves in — not dissimilar to the situation we found ourselves in some eight years ago — it would be more prudent for the US steel manufacturers to aggressively implement efficiency measures, instead of the highly disputed tariff protection they have sought, to make them competitive,” he said.
Iscor is Africa’s largest steel producer with an annual output of 7,1-million tons of liquid steel. — I-Net Bridge