The second tranche of the European Union's steel product import quotas has reached the point where some have become exhausted. Fastmarkets looks at the progress of quota take-up country by country, and reviews the likely dates for exhaustion that were calculated at the end of 2019.
Background
On February 2, 2019, the European Commission (EC)
imposed definitive safeguard measures on a list of imported steel products, in the form of tariff rates and a range of quotas that were partly annual and country-specific and partly quarterly and global.
The measures concerned 26 steel product categories and consisted of tariff-rate quotas, with any imports that exceed the quota becoming subject to duty at 25%.
The time period for the second round of import quotas for specific named countries was July 1, 2019, to June 30, 2020.
The "other countries" quota periods were for shorter time frames: February 2-March 31; April 1-June 30; July 1-September 30; and October 1 to December 31, 2019. The first such period in 2020 was January 1 to March 31.
The figures below relate to the situation on March 31/April 1, 2020.
Since this round of quotas came into place on July...