The European steel sector risks isolating itself and decoupling from the global market through its proposed tariffs and trade measures, panellists said during the Kallanish Global Flat Steel 2025 conference in Istanbul on 16 October.
Tommaso Sandrini, chief executive of San Polo Lamiere, said the EU’s decisions appear completely incomprehensible to a large part of the industry in the current context and are harmful to the EU’s manufacturing sector in the long term. They meanwhile provide only temporary benefits to steel producers.
He noted this will result in the decoupling of the EU from international markets, structural increase in steel prices, a lack of material in certain product segments and higher utilisation rates.
“Downstream manufacturing is heavily penalised in the medium to long term in global competition,” he added.
As an urgent action plan, he suggested that rapid protective measures for steel derivatives should be introduced, with strategic industrial sectors selected and supported through special investment plans. Country quotas should be avoided and products not available in the EU should be excluded from the measures.
Jaap Jan Aardenburg, head of trade affairs at Tata Steel Nederland, said the market is going through a fundamental change. To understand the trade measures, “we have to look at the big elephant in the room, which is an excess capacity of approximately 600 million tonnes globally,” he noted.
“Current EU utilisation at 63% should be 80% at the minimum,” Aardenburg said.
He claimed that CBAM is not a trade measure but an obligation, and other countries are now adapting their own carbon systems.
Genco Bolaca, managing director, Galex Steel International, warned these measures will result in an isolated EU and will change current trade flows. Both the trade measure and CBAM need to be redesigned, he suggested.
Regarding Chinese exports, which are expected to reach 120 million tonnes this year, both Sandrini and Bolaca expect no decrease in these volumes next year, while Aardenburg believes the new EU trade measures will block Chinese exports.
Burcak Alpman Türkiye
