Saudi Arabia GAFT: final anti-dumping duties on welded stainless-steel pipes from China and Taiwan (6.5%-27.3%, 5-year measure)

Mechanism

GAFT opened the anti-dumping investigation into longitudinally-welded circular stainless-steel pipes/tubes from China and Taiwan on 2 May 2024 following a complaint from Saudi domestic producers. The final determination, issued 29 June 2025, found dumping and material injury and imposed definitive per-exporter CIF duty rates ranging from 6.5% to 27.3% (exporter-specific schedule published as an annex to the GAFT decision). The measure took effect 30 June 2025 and runs for five calendar years, subject to interim/sunset review, with ZATCA responsible for collecting the duty at the border.

Product scope is limited to longitudinally-welded (as opposed to seamless) circular stainless-steel pipes and tubes — a downstream steel product used in construction, oil-and-gas piping, and industrial fabrication.

Market context

This is Saudi Arabia's second trade-remedy filing on the IPTM register (after the October 2025 GAFT titanium-dioxide anti-dumping action against China) and its first targeting a steel product and its first case naming Taiwan alongside China as a co-respondent. It expands the register's otherwise thin coverage of Gulf trade-defence measures and steel-sector anti-dumping actions outside the US/EU/BR/IN cluster, and sits alongside a broader global wave of stainless- and carbon-steel anti-dumping cases against Chinese (and in some cases Taiwanese) exporters as China's steel-sector overcapacity continues to seek export outlets.

Downstream implications

• Saudi/GCC pipe fabricators and construction/oil-and-gas contractors: input

cost uplift of 6.5%-27.3% on Chinese- and Taiwanese-origin welded stainless pipe; likely to accelerate sourcing shifts toward GCC-domestic or non-Chinese/ non-Taiwanese suppliers.

• Chinese and Taiwanese steel-pipe exporters: face a widening set of

anti-dumping perimeters (GCC joins EU, India, Brazil, Mexico, Vietnam, Indonesia, and others already active against Chinese steel-product exports).

• Watch: whether other GCC states (UAE, Bahrain, Oman) follow with parallel

investigations, consistent with GCC customs-union trade-remedy coordination patterns seen in prior aluminium and TiO2 cases.

Open questions

• Full per-exporter duty-rate table (which named Chinese/Taiwanese producers

received which rate within the 6.5%-27.3% band) was not directly retrieved — confirm against the GAFT decision annex or Umm Al-Qura gazette text when available.

• Whether the measure covers seamless as well as welded pipe variants, or is

strictly limited to the welded/longitudinal-seam product as GAFT's headline suggests.