India slaps safeguard duties on Chinese aluminum, soda ash news

Late last week, the Indian commerce ministry slapped safeguard duty on cheap aluminum and soda ash imports from China and is likely to initiate the same on twelve more products soon.

The Directorate General of Safeguards (DGS), which is under the wing of the finance ministry, in order to protect the local industry, has slapped a 35 per cent safeguard duty on aluminium sheets and 22 per cent duty on aluminium foils, in the wake of cheap Chinese imports.

Under normal circumstances, the import duty on primary aluminium is 5 per cent, while value-added items such as rolled products and foils, attracts a duty 20 per cent.

After due investigation, the DSG then imposed the safeguard duty for 200 days on aluminum imports from China to protect local industry from predatory pricing.

The Indian aluminum manufacturers said that during the April-December period, the monthly production had declined from 107 per cent to 90.3 per cent and the market share of domestic industry in flat-rolled aluminum products declined from 85 per cent in 2005-06 to 77.3 per cent in the April-December period of 2008.

But this surged during November 2008, when Chinese imports of soda ash reached 10,000 metric tonnes while in December the import was 15,000 metric tonnes.

The government is also looking at applying safeguard duty for a period of 200 days on nearly 12 other products in the chemicals and base metals sector from China and other countries since the imports of these products have surged considerably in the past months.

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