European glass fiber producers have filed a complaint to the European Commission alleging that Chinese glass fiber manufacturers based in Egypt have been benefiting from unfair subsidies and have managed to bypass anti-dumping duties directed at Chinese companies, Euro News reports, citing two sources it says are familiar with the matter.

The firms in question are being accused of setting up firms in an economic zone “that amounts to an extension of the Chinese territory abroad, enabling them to circumvent the anti-dumping measures taken in 2014 against companies established in China,” Cedric Janssens, the secretary-general of industry body Glass Fibre Europe, told Euro News.

This isn’t the first time the Commission has acted against Egypt-based Chinese firms, with the body previously imposing a 13.1% anti-subsidy duty against imports coming from Chinese firms based in Egypt in 2020, with the European Court of Justice confirming the decision last year in a decision that recognized cross-border subsidies as equivalent to subsidies as defined under EU law.

Glass fibre manufacturers on the other side of the Mediterranean are hoping that this will be increased to 25%, as the existing “13.1 anti-subsidy duty is not enough to stop the flow of imports” that are flooding the market, according to Glass Fibre Europe’s legal representative Laurent Ruessmann.

Egypt has a glass fibre capacity of 400k tons despite having no real local demand, Janssens alleges. This is nearly half of the EU’s 1mn ton market demand for the material and comes on top of Chinese overcapacity that Janssens says its twice that of demand on the continent.

Egyptian firms have also been in the European Commission’s crosshairs, having recently initiated an anti-dumping investigation in August into hot-rolled flat products of iron, non-alloy or other alloy steel imports from Egypt, India, Japan, and Vietnam — with Ezz Steel among the companies being investigated.

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