European countries increased applications for steel supplies to the United States in December

In December last year, a number of European countries increased applications for steel import licenses to the United States compared to the previous month. This is reported by Kallanish with reference to the Steel Import Monitoring and Analysis (SIMA) data of the US International Trade Administration.

In particular, Germany doubled the volume of such applications in December – to 97.1 thousand tons, and Spain submitted almost twice as many (35.3 thousand tons compared to 18.1 thousand tons in November). Italy applied for 40.75 kt of steel products in the period under review, up from 19.9 kt in November, and Austria applied for 30.8 kt of steel, up from 2.34 kt in November. The volume of requests from Greece increased to 12.5 thousand tons from 185 tons in the previous month.

As the American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI) noted, according to SIMA, the volume of applications for steel import permits in December 2023 amounted to 2.3 million short tons (2.09 million tons), which is 14.9% more than in November. The volume of authorized imports of rolled products in the period amounted to 1.74 million short tons (1.6 million tons), up 17.2% from the previous volume of supplies from abroad in November. The market share of rolled steel imports in December was 21%.

At the end of December, the US President extended the suspension of Section 232 tariffs on European steel and aluminium for another two years, until December 31, 2025. This extension will apply to products made from steel smelted in the EU. However, if the steel used by European companies is smelted in Ukraine, the suspension of tariffs will be in effect until June 1, 2024.

Starting in January 2022, the US has suspended for two years the EU import duties of 25% on steel and 10% on aluminum, introduced under the Trump administration. They were replaced by a system of tariff quotas (TRQ), which allowed the import of 3.3 million tons of European steel per year and 384 thousand tons of aluminum into the United States without the application of import duties.

As GMK Center reported earlier, in November 2023, the EU urged the USA to less rigid quotas on the import of European steel. The current system sets quarterly quotas for 54 different types of steel products for all 27 countries of the bloc separately.