The Specialty Steel Industry of North America (SSINA), Washington, says its member companies largely sustained financial losses in 2002 because of unfair trade practices.

Echoing complaints made by carbon steelmakers that eventually resulted in the Section 201 protective tariffS, the SSINA says the North American industry needs help if it is to avoid mill shutdowns, job losses and a loss of market share.

"These latest statistics reflect that for the third consecutive year, specialty steel imports captured more than a quarter of the U.S. market with little variance in the percentages," says SSINA chairman Paul A. Kelly.

A FAMILIAR WORD. Much like the aluminum and carbon steel industries before it, overcapacity is becoming a repeated word within analyses of the stainless steelmaking segment.

"Lackluster demand coupled with expanding worldwide capacity does not bode well for our industry in the short term," says Kelly. "Our goal this year is to ensure our long-term viability by working with our government representatives to take steps toward a rational global market though matching steel production with need and eliminating foreign government subsidies," adds Kelly.
The topic of eliminating government subsidies within the steel industry has been an ongoing source of conversation at meetings held by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), whose delegates meet in Paris every few months.

Delegates from some 40 nations at the two most recent OECD meetings have agreed to trim some steelmaking capacity and to continue to hash out a draft proposal to eliminate government subsidies.

In the meantime, though, the SSINA says stainless steel imports continue to pour into North America. "Imports of total stainless steel sheet/strip, plate, bar, rod and wire increased 5 percent last year to 534,000 tons," notes SSINA, a figure that is up from the 508,000 tons in 2001. This increased what SSINA calls "import penetration" to 25 percent.

Stainless steelmakers have benefited from Section 201 imports to some extent, but stainless steel bar and rod tariff rates of 15 percent recently dropped to 12 percent while the stainless steel wire tariff dipped from 8 percent to 7 percent. "The principal objective of the program is to give our companies a chance to return to normalcy after years of attack from unfairly priced, high-volume imports that were counter to free market principles," says Kelly. "We have made some progress."