HCMC – Vietnam has seen a pickup in hot-rolled steel imports from China recently, making up 74% of the country’s total import value of this product.
According to the General Department of Vietnam Customs, in June alone, Vietnam imported 886,000 tons of hot-rolled steel, which is 151% of the domestic production volume.
Of this volume, 77% came from China. The primary reason for this surge is the extremely low prices of these imports, with each ton priced at US$560, which is US$5 to US$108 lower than steel from other countries.
In the first six months of the year, Vietnam spent US$3.46 billion importing nearly six million tons of hot-rolled steel, a 32% year-on-year rise. This import volume is equivalent to 173% of domestic production. Among these imports, steel from China accounted for 74%, equivalent to US$2.5 billion, while the rest came from Taiwan, South Korea, India, Japan, and other countries.
The Vietnam Steel Association noted that the demand for hot-rolled steel in Vietnam is around 12 to 13 million tons per year, while the current domestic production capacity is about nine million tons. The influx of imported steel, which sometimes doubles the domestic output, poses a risk to local businesses, potentially causing them to lose market share to imported goods.
In 2023, Vietnamese enterprises produced only 6.7 million tons of hot-rolled steel, equivalent to 79% of the designed capacity, marking a drop from 86% in 2021. Last year, the amount of imported hot-rolled steel reached 9.6 million tons, which is 1.5 times higher than domestic production.
Previously, the Trade Remedies Authority under the Ministry of Industry and Trade announced that on May 31, it received documents supplementing the petition for an investigation into the imports of certain hot-rolled steel products from India and China.
