Siderweb: New EU measures will bring thousands of manufacturers to their knees

The European Commission’s new steel plan ‘will bring tens of thousands of manufacturing companies across Europe to their knees’. This is the warning issued by the European Association of Independent Metal Distributors (Euranimi), according to which CBAM alone ‘could increase steel prices by more than 10%’, writes Siderweb. Read the original article in Italian.

The combined effect of these measures, according to Euranimi, will be ‘explosive prices and structural shortages for European manufacturing’. The association considers the measure to be “excessive” and likely to stifle supply and cause ‘prices to skyrocket’ in a context where rapidly expanding production capacity ‘is not something that can be done overnight’. Furthermore, the current structure would roll out “a red carpet for imports of finished products” made outside the EU with cheaper, untaxed steel, while European industry would lose competitiveness due to “higher costs within the EU and loss of market share abroad”.

Euranimi is therefore asking the European Parliament and the Council to thoroughly review the proposal and supplement it with a mirror mechanism for finished products: a 50% tariff quota applied to the value of steel contained in imported goods with a steel content greater than or equal to 20%, above a reasonable volume threshold. Such a scheme, the association argues, would ensure that European producers ‘are not penalised simply because they produce within the Union’.

‘Protecting steel production is legitimate, but the entire value chain must be protected,’ says Christophe Lagrange, member of Euranimi’s Executive Board. Limiting ourselves to steelworks and their “300,000 jobs is a strategic mistake”: we need to defend the entire supply chain, “where forty times as many people work”, otherwise we risk “producing European steel for a manufacturing industry reduced to a shadow of its former self”.

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Siderweb
Italian
27 October 2025