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US import costs of steel and aluminium, used in everything from baseball bats to cars and aircraft parts, are expected to rise by more than $100bn after Donald Trump raised tariffs on the metals to 50 per cent this week.
The higher levies that took effect on Wednesday will result in additional costs of $52.6bn a year on steel and aluminium products, according to estimates by Boston Consulting Group.
The new rate takes to $104bn the total expected costs on imports, roughly double the $51.4bn impact forecast by the consultancy earlier this year before Trump originally introduced a 25 per cent levy in March.
Analysts say the complex web of tariffs imposed by the US and Trump’s frequent changes to his tariff regime have made it difficult to predict how the global trade of the metals would be affected and how much prices of the products would actually increase in the US.
“We have not really seen changes in trade flows with a 25 per cent price hike so far,” said BCG’s managing director Nicole Voigt. “The question is, will we see it with a 50 per cent price hike and this depends on how the price movement [of the metals] will go.”
During a UBS conference earlier this week, Ford’s chief financial officer Sherry House said half of the $2.5bn in gross tariff impact it forecast for 2025 came from parts that included steel and aluminium.
The numbers could fluctuate due to the tariff negotiations between the US and China, House said, adding: “The China tariffs brings the parts piece down and the aluminium and steel brings the parts piece up. So the good news is they’re offsetting.”
Canada and the European Union were the top exporters to the US of steel and aluminium products last year, while China was the largest for steel and Mexico for aluminium products, according to the Congressional Research Service.
The new US tariffs could result in export losses of up to $2bn for the metals sector in Canada for the rest of this year, $1bn for Mexico and $600mn for South Korea, Allianz Research estimated.
European steel producers have warned that the 50 per cent tariff meant that most of the 3.8mn tonnes of EU exports to the US were now under a “de facto import ban”. They are worried that much of the steel from other countries that had been destined for the US market will now be deflected towards Europe instead, similar to what happened in 2018 when the first US tariffs were introduced.
The European Commission this week reported large increases in import volumes and steep price drops for a series of steel products, including guitars to industrial robots, since the start of the year.
Tariffs imposed during the first Trump administration reduced imports of steel and aluminium products by an estimated 24 per cent and 31 per cent on average, the US International Trade Commission found in 2023.
While this raised average US prices of steel and aluminium by 2.4 per cent and 1.6 per cent respectively, American production of the metals only increased by a small amount.
US steel producers have stepped up plans to expand production to boost capacity and help to fill some of the gaps that will be left by a drop in imports, but industry experts said it would take time before the new mills were operational.
Philip Bell, president of US trade group the Steel Manufacturers Association, stressed that there had been “over $20bn of investment in new steel facilities” since tariffs were first announced in 2018.
S&P Global Ratings estimates that the higher costs from steel and aluminium alone could hit earnings of industrial goods manufacturers by “5-10 per cent without price increases in 2025”.
Don Marleau, sector lead for metals, capital goods and packaging at S&P Global Ratings, said while this meant that companies would need to raise prices by 2 per cent to hold profits steady, manufacturers were expected to share some of the rising cost burden to support sales.
