Its hopes dented by US tariffs, aluminium alloy products maker China Zhongwang eyes home comforts
10 per cent tariff on all Chinese aluminium products has made trade with US ‘pretty unviable’, says managing director
China Zhongwang Holdings, one of the country’s largest producers of aluminium alloy products, wants to grow sales domestically and in Europe, having been adversely affected by several rounds of US tariffs even before the outbreak of the US-China trade war this year.
The company, based in Liaoning in northeast China, derived as much as 41 per cent of its sales from the United States in 2009. This dropped to just 4 per cent in 2011, a year after it was hit by US countervailing duties that sought to punish Chinese products said to be benefiting from state subsidies and priced below costs.
Its products are mostly used in the construction and industrial sectors. Zhongwang’s US sales climbed back to between 8 and 12 per cent in the four years up to 2015, as it sold aluminium alloy-based pallets used by logistics companies for moving goods, which at the time were higher-value added products not affected by the duties.
“But this came to an end in 2016, when a US policy review saw the net cast wider to cover the pallets,” Amanda Xu Jing, managing director at Zhongwang, told the media on Monday.
