Vietnam and India are among fast-growing Asian steel producers at risk of being hurt if President Donald Trump goes ahead with blanket tariffs on all US imports of the metal.
The global steel industry is braced for the impact of Trump’s planned 25% levies, due to start on March 12. They’re aimed at bolstering protection for US producers, but also risk intensifying global steel tensions fueled by rampant Chinese exports. In Asia, there are concerns that at least some steel will add to a saturated regional market, if it doesn’t go to the US.
“We may see more steel from these countries being sold to Vietnam as the new target would deter them from exporting to the US,” Nghiem Xuan Da, chairman of the Vietnam Steel Association, told Bloomberg by telephone. The Southeast Asian nation has become a major steel consumer and exporter in recent years.
Steelmakers from Asia to Europe and Latin America are already reeling from a flood of cheap Chinese steel, with the nation’s 2024 exports touching a nine-year high above 110 million tons. That surge triggered a swathe of trade complaints — most recently from South Korea — and has pushed steel from other Asian nations further afield.
Trade Tensions
China’s exports are “displacing production in other countries and forcing them to export greater volumes of steel” to the US, Trump’s executive order said. The European Union is revising its protections in response to growing flows. In Asia, meanwhile, India is mulling safeguards, Vietnam is investigating Chinese steel, and South Korea may probe more of China’s products.
Asia-Pacific nations including Japan, South Korea and Australia all currently have exemptions from existing US tariffs launched in Trump’s first term, as do Canada, Mexico and a few others. Much hinges on whether those countries manage to negotiate exclusions from any fresh round of tariffs.
If not, “there will be a diversion of exporter inventory to other importer nations at aggressive prices, especially in a milieu of increasing global competition,” said Sehul Bhatt, a director of research at Indian researcher Crisil Intelligence. That could then bring down prices of steel in India, which are already close to four-year lows, he said.
There are caveats. Trump’s new metals tariffs — he’s also targeting aluminum — have yet to be finalized. In the Asia-Pacific, it’s a relatively small volume of flows that stand to be affected: a total of about 3.75 million tons from South Korea, Japan and Australia last year, according to US government data. The overall volume subject to tariff changes globally is more than 20 million tons.
Special Steels
Also, some of the affected volumes stand to include niche steel products that are set to keep flowing to the US even in the event of full-scale tariffs. Customers will just pay more.
Japan and Korea supply some of the high-grade and specialized steel types used in energy infrastructure and the automotive industry in the US, which companies there depend on, according to Wood Mackenzie Ltd. analysts Lawrence Zhang and Tiago Vespoli.
And there’s also the possibility that producers will simply have to rein in output rather than find alternative homes in oversupplied markets.
“The rest of the world could hardly absorb those volumes as global steel demand is pretty muted, which means the rest of the world, including China, will have to cut production,” said Xu Xiangchun, an analyst with Mysteel Global.
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