The European Commission said yesterday it was set to slap anti-dumping tariffs on shoe imports from China and Vietnam for a five-month period beginning in April.
EU trade chief Peter Mandelson will receive a mandate to apply the punitive tariffs today, the commission said.
Initial duties of 4 percent will be imposed on April 7, rising gradually to between 16.8 and 19.4 percent on Chinese and Vietnamese footwear, according to proposals made by Mandelson in February.
Mandelson has said there is "compelling evidence" that Chinese and Vietnamese shoes are being sold at below-cost prices in the EU.
The tariffs will affect 8 percent of shoes sold in the EU. But the issue has split the EU between more liberal northern European countries and Mediterranean member states.
Italy, Spain and Portugal, the bloc's leading producers of shoes, last week again called for stronger measures against imports from China and Vietnam.
Duties are to be raised progressively to "ensure that retailers with goods in transit are not suddenly faced with an unexpected full tariff at the border," according to EU officials.
The commission claims that there is clear proof of serious state intervention in the leather footwear sector in both Asian countries.
In contrast to the trade tussle over textiles with China last year, the EU has ruled out slapping quotas on Chinese shoes.
China's leather shoe exports to the EU increased 320 per cent in the 12 months up to March, last year to 95 million pairs. EU imports from Vietnam grew 700 per cent to 120 million pairs of shoes over the same period, according to EU statistics.
Complaints against cheap Chinese footwear have been pouring in from European manufacturers of shoes who say their sales are suffering because of the increased competition.
HORMUZ ISSUE: The US president said he expected crude prices to drop at the end of the war, which he called a ‘minor excursion’ that could continue ‘for a little while’ The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait started reducing oil production, as the near-closure of the crucial Strait of Hormuz ripples through energy markets and affects global supply. Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (ADNOC) is “managing offshore production levels to address storage requirements,” the company said in a statement, without giving details. Kuwait Petroleum Corp said it was lowering production at its oil fields and refineries after “Iranian threats against safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz.” The war in the Middle East has all but closed Hormuz, the narrow waterway linking the Persian Gulf to the open seas,
Apple Inc increased iPhone production in India by about 53 percent last year and now makes a quarter of its marquee devices there, reflecting the US company’s efforts to avoid tariffs on China. The company assembled about 55 million iPhones in India last year, up from 36 million a year earlier, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named because the numbers aren’t public. Apple makes about 220 million to 230 million iPhones a year globally, with India’s share of the total increasing rapidly. Apple has accelerated its expansion in the world’s most populous country in recent years, bolstered
HEADWINDS: The company said it expects its computer business, as well as consumer electronics and communications segments to see revenue declines due to seasonality Pegatron Corp (和碩) yesterday said it aims to grow its artificial intelligence (AI) server revenue more than 10-fold this year from last year, driven by orders from neocloud solutions clients and large cloud service providers. The electronics manufacturing service provider said AI server revenue growth would be driven primarily by the Nvidia Corp GB300 server platform. Server shipments are expected to increase each quarter this year, with the second half likely to outperform the first half, it said. The AI server market is expected to broaden this year as more inference applications emerge, which would drive demand for system-on-chip, application-specific integrated circuits
PROJECTION: TSMC said it expects strong growth this year, with revenue in US dollars projected to grow by about 30 percent, outperforming the industry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday reported consolidated sales last month reached NT$317.66 billion (US$9.98 billion), the highest ever for the month of February, driven by robust demand for chips built using the company’s advanced 3-nanometer (3nm) process. Last month’s figure was up 22.2 percent from a year earlier, but fell 20.8 percent from January, the world’s largest contract chipmaker said in a statement. For the first two months of the year, TSMC posted cumulative sales of NT$718.91 billion, up 29.9 percent from a year earlier. Analysts attributed the growth to sustained global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) products
RSS