ThyssenKrupp Europe ceo Andreas Goss has urged the European Union to guarantee fair trade through faster and more effective antidumping actions at a Eurofer European Steel Day in Brussels attended by Kallanish.

According to Eurofer president Robrecht Himpe the “…worrying” surge of steel imports into the EU in the past months is still ongoing and European producers have lost significant domestic market share in 2014. Chinese steel exports worldwide reached 93 million tonnes in 2014.

Chinese exports into Europe grew from 1.2mt in 2009 to 4.5mt in 2014. Exports have been further increasing this year. Anti-dumping actions on Chinese material have increased by 60% from 2010. Of all the antidumping investigations currently in process in the EU, 80% are on Chinese material, Himpe says.

“We are interested in free trade in the purest possible form and of course we stand for free unrestricted access to markets” Goss says. “But when markets are distorted we need TDI, we need barriers of some sort to prevent dumping from happening, to prevent the unilateral distortion of markets and also to prevent the erosion of competitive advantage… If there are sales of goods 20% below the cost of production in the respective country of origin then it is not free trade…we need a set of tools that allow us a quick reaction”, the ThyssenKrupp executive says.

Speaking for the European Commission for Trade, Maria Asenius assured that trade behaviour is constantly monitored “… as [… steel] imports become more and more threatening”. However it is difficult to find a way to speed up [… trade action] procedures, she says.

Commenting on behalf of the United States, trade lawyer and former head of import administration of the US department of Commerce Gary Horlick, warns that EU antidumping measures may have harsh repercussions. “Anything that you do here to foreign imports will be done to you oversees. China imposed antidumping duties on US GOES 3 years ago so it’s very much a reciprocal thing. This hits European industry more than it hits the US industry because the European [… steel] industry exports more than US”, Horlick concludes.