The European Commission adopted its Steel and Metals Action Plan on 19 March 2025, the first sector-specific industrial plan of its kind, in response to a crisis threatening some 300,000 direct jobs and 2.3 million indirect jobs in the sector. The plan, set out in Communication COM(2025) 125, rests on six pillars: affordable energy, preventing carbon leakage, protecting European industrial capacity, circularity, quality jobs, and de-risking decarbonisation investment. Its most immediate measure was a tightening of the EU steel safeguard quotas, effective 1 April 2025, cutting the annual liberalisation rate from 1 percent to 0.1 percent, scrapping the carry-over of unused quotas and cancelling the redistribution of banned Russian and Belarusian quota volumes, with the aim of cutting imports by about 15 percent. The Commission also promised a proposal by the third quarter of 2025 for a long-term trade measure to replace the safeguards when they expire in June 2026.
Source: Mayer Brown — https://www.mayerbrown.com/de/insights/publications/2025/03/10-key-takeaways-of-the-european-steel-and-metals-action-plan
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