One of the main factors to impact the European steel market in the coming months will be the EU’s latest safeguard quota revision, said panelists at the Kallanish Europe Steel Markets 2024 conference in Milan on Thursday. They also agreed there will be no strong regional demand driver in the remainder of the year.

The new residual hot rolled coil quota cap will likely push back some of the established importer countries. “Taiwan, Korea, Japan will be out of the game,” said Tommaso Sandrini, of S. Polo Lamiere SPA. In the medium-term, the volume from those countries will be half of what it used to be, with the upper cap now at 140,000 tonnes/quarter, he added.

Gunwook Dean Park of SeAH Coated Metal Europe foretold of a massive impact on buyers from those countries: “This is a game changer,” he said. Park was also outraged about the lack of an official statement from the EU, given that “we are only two weeks away from it [1 July, when the cap is expected to take effect].”

Julian Verden of Stemcor explained this is a “classic tactic of the EU. They will hold back their decision until the very last day, not to give anybody a run-up, and that makes importers miserable.”

While some established countries of origin are losing out, others will gain. “We are receiving orders from Indonesia and Malaysia now,” said Sandrini on the redirection of trade flows. He predicted that the limitations on tonnages will not trigger noteworthy price increases, as they would in “normal” times, as overall demand is just too weak now.

Verden compared the EU’s tactics with the children’s game Whack-a-Mole, where little animals keep popping up from different holes from the ground, in that import origins keep getting blocked and then new ones will surface. “Customers want materials delivered on a regular basis. The new rules make buying much more disruptive,” he concluded.