The Commission announced on Wednesday that it had made final countervailingduty and anti-dumping duty determinations regarding imports of certaincut-to-length (CTL) steel plate from France, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japanand Korea. The Commission found that the steel was subsidised and was beingsold in US at less than fair value. SAIL had exported 1.35 lakh tonne ofplates to the US till September last year. The anti-dumping duty order onlyapplies to material that was shipped to US after July 29, 1999, the date onwhich the US department of commerce published its affirmative preliminarydetermination in the Federal Register.

Steel plates are among the key products in SAIL's export basket and exportswere responsible for the seven per cent jump in SAIL's sales in the lastnine months of the 1999-2000 fiscal. Exports which were also the silverlining to the company's financial performance in the last quarter, expectedto end in roughly Rs 600 crore of losses.

SAIL's chief of corporate affairs Shoeb Ahmed told The Financial Express ``We are disappointed by the affirmative determinator of an injury bythe International Trade Commission regarding import of CTL steel plates fromIndia.'' With the US market closed, remunerative export of plates from Indiawill decline considerably, adversely affecting the performance of our BhilaiSteel Plant, which has been the major exporter of CTL plates'', he said.

US had imported 1.2 million short tons of steel from the five offendingcountries in 1998, out of its total steel imports of 2.2 million short tons,worth $449 million. The US steel market is estimated to gobble up 9.8million short tons of steel, 22.1 per cent of which comes from imports.