“We have been unemployed for almost 14 months”: employees and elected officials call on Brussels to save French silicon, crushed by Chinese imports

French employees and elected officials mobilized on Monday in Brussels to call on the European Union to save the French silicon industry, threatened by Chinese competition. A little-known but very strategic material, silicon metal is used in many industries (chemicals, automobiles, aeronautics, photovoltaics, electronics, etc.).

However, several factories belonging to the Spanish group Ferroglobe are seeing their future compromised due to a "flooding of the European market by Chinese silicon", explained parliamentarians from the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, who came to plead the sector's cause to the European Commission. Around sixty employees of the Ferroglobe factory in Montricher-Albanne, in Savoie, organized a rally in front of the European Parliament, to symbolize the "killing" of their industry, declared Mickaël Lambert, CGT secretary of the site. “We have been unemployed for almost 14 months, now we are back for three months of partial unemployment”, without any guarantee as to a possible restart of the site, he denounced.

The cause is a sharp increase in imports of Chinese silicon into Europe, which attracts customs duties of only 16.8% in the EU, compared to 140% in the United States. As a result, prices have fallen on the European market, which has pushed Ferroglobe to shut down several of its sites in recent months and made employees fear permanent closures. An increase in customs duties requested The transpartisan parliamentary delegation, bringing together deputies and senators from Isère, Ain, Savoie and Haute-Savoie, asked the Commission to put in place "rapid trade protection measures", according to Emilie Bonnivard, LR deputy for Savoie.

A visit marked by “good news” according to Marie-Noëlle Battistel, PS MP for Isère: the opening announced on Monday of a registration procedure for all imports of Chinese silicon into the EU. This will make it possible to retroactively impose new anti-dumping measures that Brussels could decide. But employees and elected officials are calling on the EU to accelerate the movement to contain the surge in imports, by overtaxing Chinese silicon without further delay.

The European Commission put in place measures last year to protect the ferro-alloy sector against Chinese imports, including ferro-silicon, an alloy of iron and silicon. But silicon metal, the pure form of the material of which Ferroglobe is a major producer, was not affected by this protection device.

Machine-translated from French