Posted on 11 Mar 2022
With Ukraine and Russia having all but disappeared as ferrous trading partners, EU steel buyers are calling on the bloc to review safeguard measures against other supplying regions.
“What will Brussels do now with its set of safeguard measures, so that other countries can compensate for the volumes that came from Russia and Ukraine?” an EU semi-finished steel importer ponders. “Volumes that so far came from Russia and Ukraine could potentially be supplied from other regions, many of which are also subject to import limitations.”
“ArcelorMittal Kryvyi Rih is the largest maker of long products, and some wire rod also used to come from Metinvest. They are now out of operation, and mills in Russia and Belarus will be banned from exporting,” he tells Kallanish. One interesting detail here is that “our customers want a guarantee that we do not use material that comes from Russia”, he points out.
Apart from the three countries tainted by war, the crisis is also hitting production in Moldova, which depends heavily on Russian scrap feedstock, the importer notes.
“If you add up the quotas of those four countries for exports to the EU, you know what tonnage we are missing now, and need to get from elsewhere,” he explains. He adds that there is a lot of insecurity now, not only among steel processing firms but in the larger manufacturing industry in Europe.
Source:Kallanish
