Why Are Korean OCTG Producers Playing Russian Roulette?

The following article was written by Peter Brebach, CEO of Iron Angels of Colorado. Peter is a trader who imports pipe and tube products into the United States and is well versed on the current oil country tubular goods (OCTG) issues facing the domestic steel mills. Here is his article on the subject:

Import licenses point to over 400000 tons of Korean OCTG to arrive at US shores during the month of May. I suspect this to be an all-time high, and something that will raise more than a couple of eyebrows. With the final determination of the trade cases against OCTG exported from Korea (and others) scheduled for the month of July, that makes this particularly peculiar. I have been asked to address this subject, and I will start this by answering a number of specific questions I was given.
 
1.) Why are the Koreans shipping so much OCTG tonnage, especially under the current circumstances?
 
Frankly, this puzzles me, as it does most people. The vast majority of these imports are run through Korean trading companies or through the US sales offices of Korean producers. While that means that the risk of having to face dumping duties is transferred away from the buyers, it does not make them go away. The “bite date” is already behind us, the date after which any imports might be subject to these additional duties, anti-dumping and / or countervailing.
 
The Korean mills sailed through the preliminary determination with a big fat zero margin. However, as we have seen in the case of Turkey, that is no guarantee they will remain unscathed through the second round as well. For the record, the Turkish mills were hit with a countervailing duty of around 25%, because they buy most of their raw material (HR Coil) from mills that are allegedly owned and subsidized by the Turkish government. In my long career, I have never seen anything this convoluted, and I would not rule out a similar outcome for Korea.