President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed proclamations to restore a 25% tariff on steel imports and to elevate the current tariff of 10% on aluminum imports to 25%.
Trump has long complained about foreign nations — often subsidized by their governments, particularly China — flooding the U.S. market with cheap steel and aluminum, which has factored into the decline of domestic aluminum production.
According to the White House, the objective of the 25% tariffs is to revitalize the domestic steel and aluminum industries and achieve sustainable capability utilization rate of at least 80%. (In the week ending on February 8, 2025, the capability utilization rate was 75.2 percent.)
On February 24, the Mutún Steel Complex, a steel plant in Bolivia funded by the Export-Import Bank of China, will start production. The plant plans to produce “enough output to cover half the country’s needs” which is approximately 200,000 metric tons of steel a year.
‘The Era of Bolivia’s Industrialization Has Taken Off!’
This is how Bolivia’s Mutún Steel Company titled its Jan. 7 press release, as it produced its first corrugated steel bars and wire rods.
They have worked on a project that will allow Bolivia, once one of the poorest… pic.twitter.com/R9Tkt8p074
— EIR News Service (@execintelreview) January 9, 2025
Bolivia’s Mining Minister Alejandro Santos Laura said of the country’s new steel plant on Wednesday: “When we pass 100% … we are going to build another plant, much better than the current one.” He added: “We will have no choice but to export the surplus abroad.”
Note: Bolivia currently imports 450,000 tons of steel annually, largely from Peru, Argentina and Brazil. The new steel plant is expected to reduce Bolivia’s import bill by $200 million a year.
For its first year of operation, the steel plant will be operated by the Chinese state-owned company Sinosteel Engineering and Technology, the country’s second largest importer of iron ore, which is owned by fellow Chinese state-owned steel conglomerate Baowu.
Note: According to the Congressional Research Service, the large majority of global excess steelmaking capacity is in China, which in 2020 accounted for 57% of global steel output, with all other producing countries having shares of 6% or less — the U.S. accounted for about 4%.