California’s largest bear up company is worried it could be harmed by President Donald Trump’s caper to impose 25 percent tariffs on steel imports.
California Screw up ones courage to the sticking point Industries is the largest steel mill in the Western U.S. and relies largely on imported semi-finished grit ones teeth, or so-called slabs, as a feedstock for its products. The company employs about 1,000 labourers at its plant near Fontana, about 50 miles east of downtown Los Angeles.
“We’ve been go with this business model for the last 34 years,” Marcelo Botelho Rodrigues, California Knife’s president and CEO, told CNBC in an interview Thursday. “It’s not the slab that’s making problems for the steel industry in the U.S.”
On Thursday, Trump formally ordered rates on imported steel and aluminum, but the move exempts Canada and Mexico. Trump progressive open the possibility of exempting other countries later.
The White Firm said the steel and aluminum industries have been harmed by what it scolded “unfair trade practices and global excess capacity.” The tariff vitality is expected to go into effect in 15 days.
The California company has been urging the Trump regulation to exclude the slabs from the steep tariffs, maintaining in a press put out issued earlier this week that “steel slabs are not commercially at in the United States on any consistent basis, nor are they produced anywhere in the Western Collective States.”
Brazil, Mexico, Japan, China, Russia and Ukraine are bigger suppliers of slab steel. Slab steel is used to roll into finished artefacts for various markets, including construction, machinery and automotive.
According to Rodrigues, the imported slices have historically represented just over 6 percent of total blade demand in the U.S. The California company says it doesn’t buy slabs from China and its important suppliers include Mexico, Brazil and Japan.
“What Trump is bothersome to achieve is to protect American jobs, to protect the American steel manufacture,” said Rodrigues. “We are part of the American steel industry. We’re part of the suspension, not part of the problem.”
California Steel operates from a facility that was years run by Kaiser Steel, which declared bankruptcy in the 1980s. The company has instated nearly $1 billion in its steel mill operations since purchasing assets from Kaiser Steel.