Billet-duty dispute heads to court as rolling mills sue to scrap anti-dumping duties

EXCLUSIVE- The billet-duty dispute is heading to court. The Administrative Court will hear the first lawsuit filed by rolling mills against the government’s anti-dumping duties on billet imports on 14 November, industry sources tell EnterpriseAM. The court asked the Investment Ministry to submit data on how imports have affected the market and whether national industry has grown under the duties, before issuing a binding ruling on keeping or scrapping them.

Why it matters: The duties split Egypt’s steel industry down the middle. Rolling mills buy billet and roll it into rebar, while integrated producers like Ezz Steel make their own — making cheap imported billet a lifeline to one camp and a threat to the other. The ministry turned a temporary 200-day measure from September 2025 into a three-year duty in April 2026. It was set at 13.1% and steps down 1 percentage point a year from the measure’s start in September 2025, which puts it at about 12.1% now. The court must now weigh whether that protection was justified as each side says the evidence backs its case. We covered the rolling mills’ push to scrap the duties earlier this month as they prepared their case.

Two camps

Integrated producers are digging in. Sources at Ezz Steel, El Marakby, and Al Gioshy Steel tell EnterpriseAM the market has plenty of billet, not too little. On the supply side, local plants have 13.7 mn tons of capacity but only produce 8.8 mn — leaving around 5 mn tons of “idle investment” — and they already sell about 170k tons a month, more than the roughly 100k tons a month rolling mills need to buy. Billet is not a production input for integrated plants, which make their own, the sources add. So if rolling mills are running at only 53% of capacity (8.5 mn tons of output against 16 mn of capacity, per the integrated mills’ memo to the court), the sources argue the cause is weak demand and overcapacity across the sector, not restricted feedstock.

“The duties are meant to protect local industry from unfair price competition, not to restrict output or create a monopoly,” they say, arguing that billet enters Egypt under a zero customs tariff, meaning the safeguard duty is the only shield integrated mills have against imports that compete head-on with their rebar — and the stakes are concentrated because billet represents 89-94% of the final rebar price globally, so rolling adds only about 10% in value.

Protecting the earlier stages of production is what keeps the whole chain alive, they say. The duties are not behind the price rises the sector has seen either. Rebar went from EGP 38.2k a ton in September to EGP 40.85k in October, but the integrated-mill sources point to energy and raw materials — industrial gas up 15% (USD 6.75 to 7.75 per mmBtu), electricity up more than 50%, scrap up USD 57 a ton (17%), according to their memo. “Protective duties are not the main reason behind higher steel prices,” they say.

Rolling mills read it differently: The duties “raised the cost of production inputs and threatened the continuity of the factories and the jobs they provide,” Cairo Chamber of Commerce head and El Ashry Steel Chairman Ayman El Ashry told us earlier. In our earlier coverage, he argued that the duties cut off affordable billet supply. He estimated that scrapping them could cut rebar prices by EGP 7k-10k a ton and help restart idle factories. The shortage they describe is not theoretical, according to former Metallurgical Industries Chamber head Mohamed Hanafy, who said 26 steel plants were short of billet as of March, with only six reporting sufficient feedstock.

The government in the middle: A government official tells EnterpriseAM the duties were imposed after “a thorough study of the market and the impact of dumped billet imports on industry,” and a committee is still reviewing how the duties have affected the various industrial sectors — it has not yet issued its report on the duties’ impact.

REMEMBER- The duties trace back to a complaint by integrated and semi-integrated producers — Ezz Steel, Suez Steel, and Egyptian Steel, which together account for roughly 80% of local production — over imports that jumped more than 10x between 2021 and 2024. Some producers asked for duties of 25%; the preliminary investigation recommended 16.2% in September 2025, before the final rate was set at 13.12% in April. This is not the first time this issue has reached the courts. In 2019, the Administrative Court annulled billet protective duties after a rolling-mills suit, before the state and integrated producers appealed.