Turkey's HRC import map has been redrawn: duties pushed China and Russia out, Malaysia and Vietnam in

Turkey's hot rolled coil import statistics have stopped being a story about demand and started being a story about routing. Preliminary TUIK data reported by SteelOrbis show January–September 2026 arrivals of 2.71 million tonnes, down 7.4% year on year, and September alone at 317,024 tonnes, down 23.3% month on month and 14.0% year on year. The aggregate decline is modest. The composition change underneath it is not.

The headline is the least interesting number

A 7.4% fall in nine-month volume looks like soft Turkish demand and little else. In fact roughly a million tonnes of annualised trade changed hands between origins, and the net movement is small only because the losses and gains nearly cancelled.

Source: SteelOrbis, citing preliminary TUIK data. Subtotals and changes are my calculations.

Malaysia alone replaced more than the entire Chinese volume loss. Vietnam, absent from the top ten a year earlier, shipped 49,040 tonnes, all of it booked in September. Japan, Taiwan and India together added roughly 194,000 tonnes. The origins that lost ground are, with the exception of France, precisely the countries covered by Turkey's definitive anti-dumping measure on hot rolled flat steel.

The duty wall, and the holes in it

Turkey concluded its HRC anti-dumping investigation on 11 October 2024 with Communiqué No. 2024/33, imposing duties on hot rolled flat steel from China, India, Japan and Russia calculated on CIF value. Reported rates span roughly 6% to 43.31%, with the residual rate for non-cooperating Chinese exporters at the top of that range.

The result after two years is visible in the table. Chinese shipments are down 43.5% and Russian shipments down 28.3% cumulatively; in September alone Russia delivered 1,013 tonnes against 112,763 tonnes a year earlier, a 99.1% collapse. Egypt, which is not covered by the HRC measure but has faced other Turkish trade defence actions, fell 98.2% in the month. Chinese volumes nonetheless remain the largest single origin at 639,991 tonnes — the duty raised the cost of Chinese coil without removing it, because for many Turkish re-rollers the delivered price still clears the domestic alternative.

Japan is the informative exception. It is subject to the same measure yet increased shipments by 78.7%. Duty rates are company-specific, and Japanese mills that cooperated and received low rates can compete where Chinese and Russian exporters cannot. That is the measure working as designed: it discriminates between producers rather than between products.

Malaysia and Vietnam are not named in Communiqué 2024/33. Their arrival is the predictable consequence of a duty wall that covers four origins and leaves the rest open.

Malaysia's 500% is a capacity story, not a trading accident

It is tempting to read Malaysia's 617,454 tonnes as transshipment. The numbers do not yet support that conclusion, and it matters for how the next policy step should be judged.

Malaysia has genuine, recently commissioned flat steel capacity aimed at export markets, and Turkish re-rollers have been buying it since well before the anti-dumping case concluded — Malaysian volumes were already 102,863 tonnes in January–September 2025, when China still supplied 1.13 million tonnes. What changed is scale, not existence. A 500% increase on an established base is what new capacity looks like when it finds a duty-free route into a large deficit market, not what a re-invoicing operation typically looks like in its first year.

The stronger circumstantial signal points at Vietnam. Its 49,040 tonnes appeared entirely within September, from a standing start, and it entered the top ten in a single month. That is a shipment pattern consistent with a new supplier relationship being tested at scale, and also with the kind of front-loading that precedes a trade defence action. Turkey's Ministry of Trade opened an anti-circumvention investigation in November 2023 (Communiqué 2023/32) covering hot rolled flat steel measures and naming Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Croatia and Jordan. No final anti-circumvention decision against Malaysia or Vietnam appears in the ministry's published completed-investigations record as reviewed here. Until one does, both routes remain legally open.

What the prices say

Unit values derived from the aggregate value and volume figures are indicative — they blend grades, origins and contract terms — but they are informative about direction.

August volume is derived from the reported 23.3% month-on-month decline; August value from the reported 20.9% decline. Unit values are my calculations.

Two things follow. First, September's fall was almost entirely a volume event: the average price paid actually edged up. Second, cumulative value fell 4.7% while volume fell 7.4%, so Turkey paid more per tonne in January–September 2026 than a year earlier, consistent with a mix shifting away from discounted Chinese and Russian coil toward Japanese, Taiwanese and Malaysian material. The anti-dumping regime is doing what it was intended to do to the price of imports; whether Turkish mills' order books have benefited proportionately is a separate question that the import data cannot answer.

Why this matters beyond Turkey

The redistribution is a live test of a policy model now common across the steel world: targeted anti-dumping duties rather than broad safeguards. Its weakness is structural. Duties anchor to named origins, trade flows around them within a quarter or two, and the administering authority then has to chase the leakage through anti-circumvention cases that take a year or more. Turkey's experience — four origins restricted, two new suppliers of scale inside eighteen months — is the clearest current illustration.

For exporters the lesson is that duty-free access to Turkey is a wasting asset. Malaysian and Vietnamese mills should expect their volumes to attract scrutiny if they persist at September's run-rate; a 148,570-tonne single month from Malaysia equals roughly 1.8 million tonnes annualised, which at that pace alone would exceed Turkey's entire current Malaysian intake within four months. Japanese producers, by contrast, have demonstrated that a low company-specific rate is worth more than a favourable country classification.

For Turkish producers, the import mix has become more expensive per tonne and more concentrated at the top: China, Malaysia and Russia together still hold about 65% of the market. The domestic industry's argument for tighter enforcement writes itself from this table. The risk is that each new measure simply relocates the same tonnage again, and that the eventual cost of plugging every route is a more expensive slab and coil input for the country's re-rollers and exporters.

What to watch

The September data are preliminary and TUIK routinely revises; monthly origin figures in particular can move materially. Three things will determine whether this is a rebalancing or a redirection. First, whether Malaysian and Vietnamese volumes hold through the fourth quarter at anything like September's level. Second, whether the Ministry of Trade extends the existing anti-circumvention case to a definitive measure covering Malaysia and Vietnam. Third, whether Japan's gain proves durable, which would show that a well-calibrated duty regime can reshape a supply map without simply displacing it.

On current evidence, Turkey has succeeded in making Chinese and Russian coil dearer. It has not yet succeeded in making it scarcer.