The South Korean government has launched an anti-dumping investigation into specialty steel bars imported from China.
According to the Korea Trade Commission under the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, the government on Monday began an investigation to determine whether Chinese steel bars are being dumped and whether they are causing injury to the domestic industry.
Steel bars are long rod-shaped steel products. The bars subject to this anti-dumping probe are specialty steel bars made from alloy steel other than iron, carbon steel or stainless steel. Specialty steel bars are high value-added products widely used across industries including automotive, aerospace, nuclear power and defense.
The investigation was initiated after SeAH Besteel and SeAH Changwon Special Steel filed an anti-dumping petition with the Trade Commission in late February this year. The two companies had argued that a recent surge in low-priced Chinese steel bar imports posed a serious threat to the domestic industry and called for protective measures.
According to the Korea International Trade Association, imports of "stainless and alloy steel bars," which include specialty steel bars, totaled $648 million last year, of which Chinese products accounted for 60.9%, or $395 million. While the value of Chinese imports fell 1.9% from a year earlier, the import volume rose 5.1% to 556,057 tons over the same period.
The issue is that Korean companies' related sales have shrunk even as the volume of low-priced Chinese imports has increased. SeAH Besteel's domestic sales of specialty steel bars fell 10.6% over two years to approximately 1.53 trillion won ($1.1 billion) last year. SeAH Changwon Special Steel's steel bar sales also declined 8.2%, from about 700 billion won in 2023 to around 640 billion won last year.
Meanwhile, the government has been stepping up investigations and sanctions against the dumping of steel products other than steel bars. The Ministry of Economy and Finance imposed a 21.62% anti-dumping duty on Chinese stainless steel plates for five years in September last year, followed by anti-dumping duties of up to 34.1% on Chinese carbon steel and alloy steel hot-rolled plates in November. The Trade Commission is also currently conducting a second review of anti-dumping duties on Chinese H-beams and an initial investigation into Chinese galvanized cold-rolled steel.
