Issue 07, 2025 - This week's editorial: Trump continues flexing muscles, world debates trade impact

New US President Donald Trump was a busy man last week, delivering or announcing various measures that will impact the global ferrous market. Trump re-imposed 25% steel import tariffs across the board, proposed new "reciprocal" tariffs to equalise trading terms with each partner country, and agreed to hold talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin on ending the war in Ukraine. And that was only by Thursday! While tariffs pose a major challenge to steel trade flows, the possibility of Russian sanctions being removed could open up the booming US market to Russian pig iron. While US steelmakers were giddy about Trump’s tariff action, the rest of the world pondered whether to retaliate or negotiate; not least the ailing EU, whose largest trading partner is the US. Eurofer called for urgent EU safeguard regime amendments to tackle potential trade redirection and lamented that 3.7 million tonnes/year of EU steel exports could be hit by the tariffs.

Pricing for domestically produced steel coil in the US strengthened after the tariffs were announced, with hot rolled coil spot prices rising to $670-720/short ton. However, in many cases this was sentiment driven as order intake did not pick up and buyers said they would not accept the full mill hike amounts.

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