EUROMETAL Letter to EU Commissioner Mr Valdis Dombrovskis – 28.01.2021

Dear Mr Dombrovskis,

On June the 18^th we addressed a letter to your predecessor.  In that letter, we reinforced the message that EUROMETAL was, and of course still is, in favour of fair trade, the free competition and open markets.

Since summer, most of the distributors and steel service centres across Europe, most of them covered by national federations, we have seen the market sentiment improving. At least until the moment of writing these letters. These are some good news in these months of pandemic, where most of our members have seen very dark days where our future has been put under huge consideration.

The recovery of the market demand has generated tension in the markets both in terms of tension in the supply chain as in terms of pricing, where free competition works and imbalances between offer and demand find new equilibriums.

In the steel business, however, there were additional measures taken by the Commission due to the Section 232 implemented by the US Department of Commerce. Indeed, the Commission decided to take safeguard measures to protect the European market from trade flows deviated from the US to the EU. This was a preventive action that the steel industry demanded.

As we all know, after three years, these safeguard measures should be revised. From EUROMETAL we would like to suggest you to check two elements when studying about the next steps on this topic:

• pricing evolution of the last 18 months
• stock position not customer cleared at the ports at the end of the quarter

As insiders, we believe that these elements might help you to build a case of how the market is acting, and whether the measures taken are really achieving its target.

Once more, we need the Commission to assist and care about the steel users and steel consuming industries. There will be no market for the steel production if there is not a market of consumers. There are thousands of small and medium size companies that look for free competition to defend their products and know how. We are talking about employment on manufacturing across Europe, which depends very much on all these medium and small size companies. Let’s produce locally, let’s generate value in Europe.

We offer you our contact, once again, to have point of view of a very representative layer in the steel industry as are the distributors and processors. Once again, we would like to reinforce the message, only with a strong sector of steel end users and consumers can we consolidate the industry we need to look with hope to the future.

Daniel Guinabert – EUROMETAL Managing Director

Fernando Espada – EUROMETAL President