S&P Global Platts reported that Vietnam’s Ministry of Industry and Trade has imposed 17.3% safeguard duty on steel billet imports from Malaysia and Kazakhstan effective June 13.
To Thai Ninh, director MOIT said "The World Trade Organization safeguard agreement states that for imports from a developing country accounting for less than 3% of total imports into the importing country, such country shall be excluded from the scope of safeguard measures. However in our investigations, these two origins recently saw imports in excess of 3% of total imports, so we have to include them into the list."
In 2018, Vietnam imported 38,000 tonnes of Kazakhstani-origin billets, accounting for about 55% of total imports in the year and 5,000 tonnes of Malaysia-origin billets, or about 7.2% of the total
Vietnam's billet import safeguard duty was launched March 22, 2016, under a provisional safeguard duty of 23.3% to counter large volumes of billet dumped previously from China, which damaged the local steel industry. It was later finalized to start on August 2, 2016 continuing with 23.3%, and planned for a stepwise reduction to 21.3% on March 22, 2017, and later to 19.3% on March 22, 2018, and following 17.3% on March 22, 2019 until March 21, 2020. Countries such as China, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, and Russia are currently subjected to the safeguard duty.
Source: Steel Guru
Key words: Vietnam, imposes, 17%, safeguard duties, billet imports, Malaysian, Kazakhstan
