Wood, coming anti-dumping measures on Chinese products

After having obtained the extension of anti-dumping duties on the import of birch plywood from Russia also to Kazakhstan and Turkey, the European wood industry looks forward with satisfaction to the introduction of two more important anti-dumping measures by the European Union, this time against China. The first, announced by a Commission Regulation last 18 December, will enter into force on 16 January next, and provides for a duty between 42.3% and 49.2% on Chinese wood flooring products, which will become definitive (for 5 years) next July. This decision follows investigations initiated last May thanks to reports from Fep, the European Federation of Wooden Floor Manufacturers, and other companies in the sector.

The second (decided on 17 December last) concerns the import of hardwood plywood from China and affects the panel industry in particular: following the reports of the Greenwood Consortium (the consortium that since 2023 groups together the main European producers of hardwood plywood from Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Hungary, Latvia, Italy, Poland and Spain), the EU has decided to start the necessary checks to assess the existence of dumping phenomena. If this is the case, a temporary duty should be introduced between May and June of next year, destined to become definitive by the end of the year, but with an important novelty (which also concerns the duty on flooring), namely the retroactive application of the duty up to nine months before its definitive introduction, in order to avoid possible 'runs' on stocks of material below cost, as happened in the past whenever the introduction of anti-dumping measures was ventilated.

"The application of duties is certainly not the solution to the imbalances in competitiveness brought about by economic globalisation," observes Nicoletta Azzi, councillor of Assopannelli of FederlegnoArredo and owner of Panguaneta, one of the European companies selected by the Commission to collaborate in verifying the existence of unfair behaviour on the part of Chinese manufacturers. However, in a reflective phase of demand, not to say stagnant, in many sectors of manufacturing, anti-dumping measures can be a useful tool to at least smooth out the market distortions that penalise European companies, called upon by the Union to comply with quality standards, safety and environmental protection standards, whose objectives are worthy of support, but which give rise to additional production costs, aggravated by the fact that, until now, Brussels has vice versa applied very wide meshes and few controls to non-EU producers selling in Europe, often leading to an imbalance in competitiveness.

Something, however, seems to have changed in the Commission's sensitivity towards manufacturing companies: 'Since the beginning of 2024, some 15 anti-dumping procedures have been initiated in the most diverse product categories,' explains Lorenzo Onofri, president of Fep. 'The one on wooden flooring from China became necessary because, although Chinese products have been imported into Europe for years and there has always been a price gap, the situation has precipitated in the last two years. Market surveys have shown that in the period 2021-2022 (i.e. the two-year period of a sharp increase in the prices of raw materials and semi-finished products) there was a significant increase in imports of Chinese flooring, the prices of which rose by between 15% and 20%, while European products saw increases of up to 60% in the same period, leading to a clear competitive disparity.

"This was the wake-up call that made it necessary to initiate a dumping procedure because there is a major imbalance between the cost of the important raw materials from China, which we know well because they are largely of European and especially French origin, and the final cost of the processed products that the Chinese companies resell in Europe". Impossible, the companies pointed out, for the floors to return to the EU at prices that, in many cases, could not even cover those paid by the manufacturers for certain components, such as French oak.