Australia's BlueScope surges on Trump's plan to double tariffs on steel imports
June 2 (Reuters) - Shares of Australian steel producer BlueScope Steel (BSL.AX), opens new tab jumped on Monday to a more than three-month high after U.S. President Donald Trump said he planned to double tariffs on imported steel.
Shares of BlueScope, which operates five businesses in North America including the North Star mill in Ohio, were up as much as 9.4% at A$24.88 in early trade.
The stock was among the top performers in the broader ASX 200 benchmark index (.AXJO), opens new tab, which was down 0.4%.
Trump on Friday said that he planned to double tariffs on imported steel and aluminium to 50%, ratcheting up pressure on global steel producers and deepening his trade war.
These proposed tariffs could bode well for BlueScope in enhancing steel prices in the U.S., thus driving tailwinds for the company, said Grady Wulff, a market analyst at Bell Direct.
In mid-February, the stock rose 12% after the company's chief executive Mark Vassella said that the business could benefit from Trump's protectionist tariffs.
However, shares have slipped nearly 10% since Vassella's statements.
Uncertainty of a rebound in demand from China for steel and steelmaking ingredients has weighed on all companies with exposure to this market, Wulff said, along with tariffs which are increasing uncertainty around the recovery of demand for steel-related materials.
BlueScope has borne the brunt of weak iron ore prices, which have fallen 3.5% so far this year.
North America was BlueScope's biggest revenue-generating segment in the six months to December 31, 2024, accounting for 42%, or A$309 million ($199.77 million), of all underlying earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation. Australia made up 39%, or A$288 million.
($1 = 1.5468 Australian dollars)
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
14 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Trump's crusade against all immigrants – even legal ones – is unprecedented
The Donald Trump administration has billed itself as taking unprecedented steps to crack down on illegal immigration. While the total number of deportations has yet to surge, it may happen soon. The homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, supports suspending habeas corpus to speed up deportations, and the border czar, Tom Homan, has suggested blatantly ignoring court orders. Private companies are also lining up to cash in on mass deportations. Nonetheless, Trump's approach so far to immigration deemed illegal has not differed much from what Barack Obama and Joe Biden did. So why does everything feel different? The answer is that Trump has launched an unprecedented crusade against legal immigrants. And the tactics have been jarringly lawless and cruel. For example, Trump's administration has almost completely banned refugee resettlement, sought to revoke temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands who have immigrated to flee extreme conditions, eliminated the legal status of thousands of international students, arrested legal asylum seekers at their immigration check-ins, jailed other legal asylum seekers in a maximum security prison in El Salvador, declared an end to birthright citizenship and revoked the legal status of nearly a million humanitarian parolees who had applied for legal entry using the CBP One app. While the Obama and Biden administrations likewise took aggressive measures to regulate undocumented immigration – thus earning well-founded criticisms from immigration activists who took to calling Obama the 'deporter-in-chief' – both presidents also worked to expand the pathways for legal immigration. Some of their initiatives were blocked by Congress or the courts, but the result was a net expansion of legal immigration under both administrations. On the other hand, Trump has consistently worked to block as many pathways to legal migration as possible. In Trump's first term, certain aspects of his immigration agenda were similarly constrained by Congress or the courts, but the result was still a major decrease in legal immigration. In Trump's second term, this assault on legal immigrants has escalated at a furious pace, and while courts have already found many of these actions illegal according to long-established precedent, the administration shows no sign of slowing down. Indeed, Trump officials have become increasingly bold in defying court rulings, and all of this is taking place under the watch of a supreme court so Trump-friendly that last year it granted him sweeping immunity to commit crimes. As a historian of border policy, I find Tump's attack on the CBP One app especially demoralizing. A longstanding contradiction in our immigration system is that while technically people have the right to apply for asylum once they reach US soil, it is incredibly difficult to arrive in the US to exercise this right. Accordingly, the only legal way to immigrate for the vast majority of people is to first survive a deadly gauntlet of oceans, jungles, deserts and criminal organizations, and only then begin an asylum application, which is still a long shot. David Fitzgerald's 2019 book Refuge Beyond Reach offers a detailed description of this insidious system and its long history. While it was largely unappreciated at the time, the Biden administration took meaningful steps to address this deadly contradiction by creating a way to legally apply for asylum through the CBP One app while still abroad. This enabled people facing grave humanitarian crises to start applications outside the US, and if approved, they could then buy plane tickets and travel to the US safely with humanitarian parole. The initiative was successful, legal, and in many ways, historic. Hundreds of thousands of people were able to migrate legally and escape extremely difficult conditions. This infuriated conservatives, who launched a barrage of vicious lies to demonize the program and the people using it. JD Vance insisted on the debate stage that these immigrants were illegal, and when corrected by debate moderators, whined that fact-checking was against the rules. Ted Cruz used his podcast to accuse Biden of chartering flights to bring in undocumented people who would vote Democrat. And Trump accused them of eating pets. Just by cancelling the program for future enrollees, Trump is already launching a disturbing assault on legal immigration. Yet in an escalation of cruelty that is difficult to even comprehend, Trump canceled the program retroactively as well, capriciously revoking the legal status of hundreds of thousands of extremely vulnerable people who simply followed the rules. If you think that that sounds dystopian and cruel, you're right. And that's exactly the point: cruelty itself is a tactic to scare immigrants away. The child separation policy from Trump's first term was an early example of this penchant for using visible displays of cruelty as an immigration deterrent and his new administration has worked around the clock to invent creative new horrors: from shipping deportees to Guantánamo Bay, to sending masked agents to disappear students, to indefinitely detaining immigrants with no criminal record in a notoriously dangerous prison in El Salvador (many of whom were arrested while attending legal immigration appointments), and then sending Noem to El Salvador to do a photoshoot with these political prisoners as props. The message to immigrants is clear: leave, or never come in the first place, because this could happen to you, even if you do it 'the right way'. The takeaway from all of this is that right now, real people – our friends, families, students and neighbors – are suffering at the hands of a cruel and lawless government. And while Republican policymakers are driving these actions, many centrist Democrats, such as Gavin Newsom, are giving tacit approval by writing off these disturbing human rights violations as merely the 'distraction of the day'. I refuse to ignore this suffering. I hope you refuse as well. Daniel Mendiola is a professor of Latin American history and migration studies at Vassar College.
Times
15 minutes ago
- Times
Faulty car tax data blamed for overstating April inflation
Act now to keep your subscription We've tried to contact you several times as we haven't been able to take payment. You must update your payment details via My Account or by clicking update payment details to keep your subscription.
The Independent
15 minutes ago
- The Independent
Europe's central bank expected to lower interest rates as Trump's trade war threatens growth
Lower inflation and concern that U.S. President Donald Trump 's trade war will slow already modest growth have cleared the way for the European Central Bank to cut interest rates at Thursday's policy meeting, a step that would lower borrowing costs for consumers and businesses and promote economic activity. With a cut widely expected by market analysts, a key question is how low the bank will go, given uncertainty about the impact of U.S. trade policy on Europe's export-dependent economy. Bank President Christine Lagarde will face questions about the bank's outlook for coming meetings at her post-decision news conference. A cut of a quarter percentage point would be the eighth rate cut since June 2024 and would take the bank's benchmark rate to 2%. Trump on April 2 announced a 20% tariff, or import tax, on goods from the European Union. He later threatened to raise the tariff to 50% after expressing dissatisfaction with the progress of trade talks with the EU. Trump and the EU's executive commission have agreed to suspend implementation and any retaliation by the EU until July 14 as negotiators seek to reach agreement. Trump added more disruption this week by suddenly increasing a 25% tariff on steel imports to 50% for all countries except for the U.K. The threat of even higher tariffs has raised fears that growth will underperform already modest forecasts. The EU's executive commission lowered its growth forecast for this year to 0.9% from 1.3% on the optimistic assumption that the 20% tariff rate can be negotiated down to no more than 10%. Low inflation has bolstered the ECB's ability to cut rates. Annual inflation for the 20 countries that use the euro fell to 1.9% in May from 2.2% in April as energy prices eased. The ECB raised rates to a record high of 4% to suppress a 2021-2023 inflation outbreak that reached double digits. But with inflation now below its 2% target, the bank has more freedom to cut. Lower rates make it cheaper to borrow and buy things, supporting demand for goods and in theory increasing spending and investment.
