China protests inclusion in US anti-dumping probe on electrical steel

China should not be included in the USA’s anti-dumping (AD) and countervailing duty (CVD) probe on the import of grain-oriented electrical steel (GOES), the Chinese Ministry of Commerce said.

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“I would like to make a special mention of the AD and CVD case on GOES. According to US statistics, GOES imports from China only account for a very small percentage of its total import volume of the product, and is the lowest among the seven countries being probed,” Shen Danyang, a spokesman for the ministry, told a press conference on Thursday October 31.

China exported 370 tonnes of GOES to the USA in 2012, according to the US Department of Commerce.

“According to related World Trade Organisation regulations, imports from China are negligible. Thus, China should not have been included in the case.”

Apart from China, the US Department of Commerce is investigating GOES imports from Czech Republic, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Poland and Russia.

Shen pointed out that the USA had initiated several trade investigations on Chinese products recently, and expressed hopes that the country was not heading towards protectionism.

Meanwhile, one of China’s major GOES producers, Baosteel Co, said it would participate actively in the US probe in the hope that it would not affect its exports.

“Baosteel entered the high-end GOES market in the USA in 2012, and the country is one of the major export target markets for Baosteel’s GOES,” the steelmaker’s chairman, He Wenbo, said at an online conference on Wednesday October 30.