Source: Al Manassa, Mesteel Egypt Steel News, Al-Ahram Weekly and Adalytica, October 2026
Egypt's independent steel re-rollers are pressing the government to review the country's billet import duty, warning that the trade measure has choked off their main source of semi-finished steel and pushed rebar prices to record levels. Egypt currently applies a definitive safeguard duty of 13 percent, with a minimum of USD 70 per tonne, on billet imports, a rate scheduled to step down to 12 percent with a USD 64 floor during the period from September 2026 to September 2027. The measure followed a provisional duty of 16.2 percent introduced in September 2025 and was imposed to shield domestic billet producers from cheap imports.
The effects are now visible across the market. Since the duty took effect, Egyptian rebar prices have climbed from roughly EGP 34,000 per tonne, about USD 650, to around EGP 41,000 per tonne, close to USD 784, including 14 percent VAT. Market leader Ezz Steel raised its ex-works rebar price by about EGP 1,000 per tonne to EGP 40,850 from 1 October, while El Garhy Steel announced an increase of roughly EGP 1,100 per tonne. Integrated producers also lifted raw billet prices by about EGP 1,000 per tonne to some EGP 34,000 per tonne, reflecting higher energy costs, a weaker Egyptian pound that has slipped past EGP 52 to the US dollar, and elevated freight bills after Brent crude climbed to around USD 108 per barrel.
Re-rollers, which buy billet and roll it into finished bars and rods, say they have been hit from both directions. Billet typically accounts for 89 to 94 percent of the price of rebar, leaving thin conversion margins even before duties and freight. Several independent mills have halted production entirely, and one producer has reported operating at only around 15 percent of capacity, while port-bonded stocks of imported billet have been exhausted. According to industry officials, integrated producers currently cover only about 5 percent of the operational needs of the country's rolling mills, with delivery intervals stretching to two or three months, even though Egypt still imported roughly 430,000 tonnes of billet during the first eight months of 2026.
The dispute has split the industry. El Garhy Steel chairman Gamal El Garhy has called for an independent committee drawn from the investment and industry ministries and the cabinet to assess the impact of the duty using audited financial statements and utility consumption data, arguing that smaller re-rollers pose no threat to integrated producers. Ezz Steel has defended the measure as a proportionate, time-limited remedy, estimating that domestic billet production could cut the country's roughly USD 1 billion annual billet import bill by about USD 600 million, and has proposed transparent domestic billet pricing and committed supply volumes for re-rollers. With Egyptian billet capacity standing at about 13.6 million tonnes a year against output of 8.8 million tonnes, producers and re-rollers met on 11 October to seek a compromise over the future structure of the country's steel industry.
