The Bureau of Foreign Trade yesterday confirmed that the US steel industry had requested that the US government impose anti-dumping and countervailing duties on Taiwanese steel nails.
The bureau said Taipei would watch Washington’s investigation closely and called on local manufacturers to cooperate with the government in preparing for the US’s anti-dumping and anti-subsidy probes.
In a statement issued on Thursday, Mid Continent Steel & Wire Inc said it had made a complaint to both the US Department of Commerce and the US International Trade Commission, asking them to impose anti-dumping and countervailing duties on imports of steel nails from Taiwan, India, South Korea, Malaysia, Oman, Turkey and Vietnam.
The Poplar Bluff, Missouri-based company said imports of steel nails from these seven countries have materially injured the US steel sector. It also alleged that dozens of foreign government programs are likely to provide unfair subsidies to producers of steel nails in these countries.
The US Department of Commerce is in charge of both anti-dumping and anti-subsidy inquiries, while the US International Trade Commission (ITC) is responsible for looking into the damage incurred by the US steel industry, the bureau said.
The ITC has asked the Taiwanese respondents in the case to answer its questionnaire by June 12, the bureau said.
According to US Customs statistics, steelmakers from the seven countries shipped 255,639 tonnes of steel nails to the US last year, up by nearly 90 percent from 134,821 tonnes in 2011.
Shipments of steel nails from the seven countries accounted for 51.2 percent of all nail imports in the US last year, compared with 30.4 percent in 2011, data showed.
If the US government decides to start an investigation into steel nails, it would be the second probe into the nation’s steel product exports following last year’s probe into non-oriented electrical steel (NOES) products, it added.
On May 16, the US Department of Commerce announced it had set preliminary anti-dumping duties on Taiwanese NOES makers.
Leicong Industry Co (麗鋼) has been ordered to pay an anti-dumping tariff of 52.23 percent, while China Steel Corp (中鋼) and other Taiwanese firms have been ordered to pay a 28.14 percent tariff.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
RSS