Insight

Anti-dumping: The industry’s viewpoint

In the last edition of Fastener + Fixing Magazine we invited the European Fastener Distributors Association and the European Industrial Fasteners Institute to give us their perspective on the anti-dumping investigation into imports of certain iron or steel fasteners from the People’s Republic of China (2020/C 442/06). For this issue we have invited individual manufacturers and distributors to give us their perspective.

Nobody’s thoughts have been omitted. If ideas or beliefs are not represented it is simply because they were not provided. Through necessity of space, some contributions have been edited, but we have been meticulous in retaining the core of each contributor’s perspective. We also gave companies the opportunity to remain anonymous if they preferred. We make no claim for how representative these assessments are, but they represent both sides of the discussion and make for a fascinating read.

A distributor's perspective

We are an importer and wholesaler from the Netherlands and have been importing fasteners from the Far East for decades. In our ‘simple’ business sense, this new anti-dumping investigation and any potential tariffs are inconsistent with fair and free trade around the world, and not based on truth.

In our perspective there has been no ‘dumping’ of fastener products from China in the last few years. In fact, the price of the products have gone up in 2020 due to increasing raw material prices, which was settled with a favourable euro to US dollar exchange rate last year.

The fact that China has been exporting more fasteners to Europe is not because of their price level being extremely low, but because they have the knowledge, machines and products, and so the capacity to sell fasteners to Europe, like they do to the rest of the world. For us it’s very strange to hear that this investigation focuses on the market share of imported fasteners from China to Europe instead of the price level.

This is not the right way you should measure anti-dumping. If you make decisions on import regulation based on price, then you should investigate the price. If new anti-dumping-fees will come, and we think they will come, we will find our way again as importers, but it will inevitably cause new price increases and agitation in the market. This is on top of the Covid-19 pandemic; historically high container prices; and fast increasing costs and raw material prices. This would make it exceptionally bad timing for us and our customers.