Industrial Policy & Trade Monitor· 2663 actions· ✨ 89 recent

On 8 July 2025 the European Commission adopted Communication COM(2025) 530 final, the "European Chemicals Industry Action Plan", together with companion staff-working document SWD(2025) 191. The Plan launches a Critical Chemicals Alliance (CCA) of Member States and industry stakeholders to safeguard EU production of strategic base chemicals (ammonia, urea, ethylene, propylene, methanol, chlorine, silicon and other high-volume building blocks) against capacity closures driven by structurally high energy/feedstock costs and third-country oversupply. The package combines (i) accelerated trade-defence on imports of PVC, melamine, glyoxylic acid, ethanolamines and polyols plus extension of the Combined Safeguard Mechanism into chemicals; (ii) energy-cost relief through swift implementation of the Affordable Energy Action Plan and an indirect-CBAM offset for chemicals exposed to high-energy input costs; (iii) a 6th Omnibus simplification package overhauling REACH, CLP labelling, cosmetics and fertilising-product rules with claimed industry savings of at least €363m/year; (iv) a framework for a follow-on Critical Chemicals Act and PFAS restrictions preserving critical applications. The chemicals sector covers ~29,000 EU companies, 1.2m direct jobs, and ~19m dependent supply-chain jobs.

The European Commission imposed definitive anti-dumping duties on imports of self-propelled mobile access equipment (MAE — aerial work platforms and similar machinery for lifting persons to heights of 6 metres or more) from China via Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/45 of 8 January 2025, with duties ranging from 20.6% to 54.9% depending on the exporting producer. A companion countervailing-duty (anti-subsidy) regulation, CR (EU) 2025/796 of 24 April 2025, added CVD layers of 7.3%–14.2%, bringing the combined AD+CVD duty range to 20.6%–66.7%. The combined package is the second EU trade-defence-against-China initiative completed in the first half of 2025, following the biodiesel AD case (CR 2025/261), and significantly raises the cost barrier for Chinese MAE producers — principally Sany, Zoomlion, and XCMG — in the EU market.

Regulation (EU) 2023/2675 — the Anti-Coercion Instrument (ACI) — is the EU's first horizontal trade-defence framework explicitly empowering the Union to respond to economic coercion by third countries. Adopted by the European Parliament and Council on 22 November 2023, published in the Official Journal on 7 December 2023, and in force from 27 December 2023, it lets the European Commission (i) determine that a third country is applying economic coercion against the Union or a Member State, (ii) seek dialogue, cessation, and reparation, and (iii) impose Union response measures — including tariffs, services-trade restrictions, IP-rights restrictions, public-procurement restrictions, and FDI restrictions targeting nationals or controlled entities of the coercing state. It complements but does not duplicate the Foreign Subsidies Regulation (which addresses subsidies, not coercion).