India’s Cold Rolled Steel Manufacturers Association in a letter to Steel Minster Mr RCP Singh has urged to take steps to bring down the domestic steel prices, increase domestic consumption and at the same time make required HR Coil available in the thickness range of below 2 mm and special quality steel through imports & domestic supplies by

 

Imposing export duty on HR Coil with the export duty or suspending export of HR Coil

 

Reducing basic custom duty on HR Coils from 7.5% to 0%

 

CORSMA ED Mr NK Sood said "The price of HR Coil has doubled to INR 68000 per tonne over a period of just one year. The price of HR Coil is considered the benchmark price for all the downstream CR products, Tube & Pipes and manufactured products. The cascading increase in the prices of various products leads to higher infrastructure and construction cost and that of domestic consumer durable and automobile products. The price increase has resulted an increase in inflation and reduction in the steel consumption.”

 

He argued “HR Coil & Semis constitute 64% to 69% of the total exports of finished steel and semis. HR Coil export alone constitutes 51 to 56% of the total exports of finished steel. China has withdrawn export rebates on HR Coil whereas continuing with the export rebate on most of the downstream products from May 2021. This only indicates that China is promoting exports of value added products rather than semis and intermediates unlike India.”

 

Mr Sood also said “Although global prices of HR Coil are high but domestic prices in China are INR 10,000 per tonne lower than that in India. Further, even on removal of Import Duty on HR Coil, import prices from China will be still costlier by Rs.6000 per tonne over the domestic prices.”

 

CORSMA represents the secondary & non integrated producers of Cold Rolled products spread all over the country with an annual production capacity of over 6 million tonnes of value added Cold Rolled products including Galvanised, Colour Coated, Tin plates and Electrical steel for supply to auto sector, consumer durable industry, electrical equipment manufactures, engineering industry and construction sector.

 

source：SteelGuru Business News