So far seventeen nations and territories have started investigation over 128 trade defense cases against Vietnam’s export goods, 85 percent of these are related to steel industry.

A total of 11 markets have filed lawsuits against Vietnamese steel namely the US, the EU and the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) while Malaysia, Turkey and Taiwan (China) are considering to do so.

The capacity redundancy of the world steel industry has strongly impacted steel production of many countries including Vietnam.

According to Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), steel output in the world has gone double from 2000 to 2016 reaching 2.39 billion tons.

Production capacity has outstripped demand by 700 million tons in 2015 and 800 million tons in the following year. China’s production increase has been blamed for the surplus. Specifically, the country produced 488 million tons in 2006 and 1.6 billion tons in 2016.

Many countries have applied many measures to tackle the issue. As of April this year, the United States Department of Commerce has launched 437 anti-dumping duty investigations and orders including 225 orders concerning to steel including Vietnamese products, according to deputy minister of Industry and Trade Tran Quoc Khanh.

The European Community (EC) has applied defense measures against import steel products to prevent them from shifting from the US to nations in the union.

Vietnamese businesses have focused on improving their production process and competitive ability to deal with the increasingly trade defense.