Tehran, Iran, April 23
By Mehdi Sepahvand - Trend:
Iran's Mobarakeh Steel Company prefers to export its product at $250 per sheet rather than to sell it to Iranian customers at $300, but that is not the only thing that is wrong with Iran's steel industry.
The country is full of iron mines and giant steel factories, but steel industrialists here have been suffering from a dumping by Iran's business buddy China.
Iran was one of the last 40 countries that had been affected by China's steel dumping to fight the blow by posing tariffs on imports, Yazd Steel Rolling CEO Mohammad Ehramian told Trend April 23.
In the first 15 workdays of the current Iranian fiscal year (which started March 20), steel price in Iran has jumped up by 68 percent.
Head of Pipe and Profile Association Mohammad Ali Aboee earlier said that the jump is due to wrong information given out by the Ministry of Industry, Mine, and Trade.
"Within the few weeks since the New Year, steel imports tariffs grew from 4 to 20 percent without asking even once for our opinion as a steel organization," he said.
Meanwhile, reports go that about 40,000 workers in downstream steel factories are at the verge of going jobless.
Lack of transparency in the merchandize stock market is another factor that has harmed the industry, Aboyee believes.
Ehramian said that the new tariffs, which he put at 10 to 25 percent, are effective in putting China out of its place in the Iranian market. However, one must wait to see what side effects the new tariffs would cause.
Officials have said Iran is going to increase its steel production to 55 million tons per year in ten years.
Over 8.202 million tons of crude steel was produced in Iran during the first half of the previous Iranian fiscal year (March 21- Sept. 22, 2015), a fall of 1.8 percent year-on-year.
Iranian companies also produced 8.177 million tons of steel products during the 6-month period.
The Islamic Republic's crude steel output reached 16.33 million metric tons in 2014, with Iran being the 14th major crude steel producer in the world.