Ukraine exported or requested permission to export 102,066 metric tons of steel products to the European Union in last year.
This was 86.54 percent of the quota of 117,944 metric tons that the EU allocated to Ukraine, the Ukrainian Ministry of Economics and European Integration reported.
The unused quota cannot be postponed to this year and is lost for the Ukrainian metal mills, a source at the Economics Ministry told Interfax-Ukraine.
Chief of the metallurgical industry department of the Industrial Policy Ministry Volodymyr Hranovsky assumed in an interview with the agency that metal products supplies to the EU are hampered by price parameters. At the same time, he added that last year Ukraine sold to the EU around 1.5m metric tons of metal products, including scrap metal.
Director for marketing, foreign economic ties and sales of Kryvorizhstal Valeriy Stasiuk in his turn did not rule out there is some lack of precision in the information of the Economics Ministry, connected with the delay of information on supplies.
"Particularly, late in December we continued supplying SB2 and SB3 metal products to the EU, that is why the Economics Ministry might have received not all of the information on them," the expert believes.
Stasiuk also assumed that the cause behind the failure to use up the quota could be its insignificant volume, which made export economically unprofitable or impeded contract conclusion: "The buyers showed small interest in such batches of metal products."
Meanwhile, Deputy Director General, head of the foreign economic ties department of Illich Mariupol metallurgical mill Serhiy Savchuk believes that the reason behind the failure to use the quota was favorable situation on sales markets of other countries, which together with the factor of small amounts of the EU quotas caused less attractiveness of EU markets.
As was earlier reported, in 2001 Ukraine and the EU initialed an agreement on trade in several kinds of steel products for the period from 2002 to 2004. At that time the parties came to agreement to increase quotas for Ukraine by 35%, up to 355,000 metric tons. At the same time Ukraine pledged not to apply any limitations on scrap metal exports to EU countries.
In the meanwhile, the European Commission did not sign this agreement and unilaterally reduced quotas for Ukrainian metal imports to EU states. Brussels refused to endorse this document because of the Ukrainian government's failure to pay back VAT to metal exporters.
As a result of long lasting consultations, the European Commission cut the level of quotas on the export of Ukrainian metals to EU member-countries in 2003 to 185,000 tons. At this, the allocation of this quota was held only in August, 2003, after which it was lowered to around 118,000 metric tons.
The EU left the quota for import of Ukrainian metal products in 2004 at the level of 184,546 metric tons. Interfax