Domestic Steel Producers Question Chinese Commitments
“We have seen posturing like this by China before,” said Andrew Sharkey III,
president and CEO of AISI. “China makes promises, and then ignores them. China
promised to limit new capacity. It has not. China promised to take its most
inefficient and polluting steel mills out of production. It has not. China
promised to allow its currency, the RMB, to revalue to a market level. It has
not. It’s not clear to me why we should believe China’s promises now. We intend
to watch what they do, not what they say.”
Thomas Danjczek, president of SMA, stated: “If China exports 10% of its
production, its exports will equal half of U.S. annual production. China is not
a low-cost steel producer. What gives the Chinese government, with its
state-owned steel industry, this sense of entitlement to the North American
market, and the right to determine the amount of steel to be exported? China
intends to continue expanding its steel production, which means that exports
will continue to expand as well. It takes real nerve to claim that this is
restraint, when China is really declaring its intention to increase exports of
steel that it should never have produced in the first place.”