ArcelorMittal settlement is new and tricky territory for competition authorities
But the end of the long-running David and Goliath battle suggests the steel giant and the state may have found a way to forge a symbiotic future, writes Trudi Makhaya
IT WAS a long-running battle that could no longer go on. The David in this story furiously hopped around Goliath, without much success, until the giant, for other reasons, ran out of steam.For most of the post-apartheid era, the pricing of steel has been contentious. Steel is important to any economy with a sizeable manufacturing sector. Iscor, the predecessor to Arcelor Mittal SA and a creature of the 1928 South African Iron and Steel Act, was a strategic link in the apartheid state’s industrialisation drive. But with privatisation in 1989, the accusation has long been that the company became at best indifferent, at worst hostile, to SA’s developmental agenda.Repeated calls have been made for the company to adopt a pricing model that would ensure that downstream, steel-consuming industries thrive. Instead, for many years, the company stuck with import parity pricing, charging local manufacturers as if they were importing the steel from distant and expensive intern...
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