March 28, 2025
PATNA – Chennai-based Rakesh Jain, who makes stainless steel vacuum bottles, said his business struggled to compete with cheap Chinese imports.
“We had to sell at a cheaper rate, so we couldn’t make much money. We didn’t have the investment to plough back into additional capacity. We were never able to grow,” Mr Jain said.
He said about 90 per cent of the stainless steel vacuum bottle market was cornered by imports from China, leaving Indian manufacturers either breaking even or operating with very small profit margins.
But now, he sees an opportunity after the Indian government, in a bid to protect domestic industries, imposed an anti-dumping duty of US$1,732 (S$2,320) per tonne on vacuum-insulated flasks and other stainless steel vacuum vessels from China.
Manufacturers said the anti-dumping duty, imposed on March 17, would give them a competitive edge.
Mr Jain’s small business, Thermo Housewares, makes stainless steel vacuum bottles and sells to larger businesses apart from exporting. It produces 100,000 bottles a month, with prices ranging from 250 rupees (S$3.90) to 800 rupees.
“This anti-dumping duty will definitely help us. We will look at investment and scale up,” he said.
Anti-dumping duties are a protectionist measure that a World Trade Organisation member can take if goods are being dumped at a lower price than the cost in the home market or lower than the cost of production.
The Indian government last week decided to levy anti-dumping duties on not just vacuum flasks, but four other products. They are aluminium foil; soft ferrite cores, which are magnetic materials often used in high-frequency applications such as transformers and inductors; trichloroisocyanuric acid, used as a disinfectant or bleaching agent; and polyvinyl chloride paste resin, a plastic material.
Prices of vacuum bottles could go up by more than 10 per cent, while aluminium foil could go up by 7 per cent, said retailers and manufacturers.
The anti-dumping penalties, which are mostly aimed at Chinese imports, were levied after two years of consultations by the Commerce Ministry. Investigations revealed that certain Chinese steel vacuum bottles were being exported to India at prices below normal market rates, negatively affecting local producers.
A handful of manufacturers has closed in the last few years due to losses, said Mr Bharat Agarwal, treasurer of the All India Steel Bottle Association and director of Clay Craft India, which manufactures vacuum bottles.
India’s insulated bottle market is a fast-growing sector, whose value is expected to jump from US$370.31 million in the financial year 2024 to US$676.33 million in the financial year 2032, according to Markets and Data, a market intelligence and business consulting organisation.
Mr Agarwal, whose manufacturing unit in northern Rajasthan state can produce 5,000 bottles a day, has been making only 3,000 due to an influx of Chinese imports. But it has decided to seize the latest opportunity by scaling up production to 10,000 bottles a day within the year.
“Because of the anti-dumping duty, we have got confidence,” he said.
Not-so-happy consumers
While manufacturers are upbeat, a rise in prices is expected.
Mr Santosh Pai, an honorary fellow of the Delhi-based Institute of Chinese Studies, said the anti-dumping duties “might escalate costs for consumers” in the short term. But manufacturers expect prices to stabilise in the long term.
Mr Vedant Padia, director of Pexpo, which claims to be India’s largest manufacturer of stainless steel bottles, said: “We will be able to operate at lower margins because we will have volumes as our economies of scale will kick in.”
India has been one of the top users of anti-dumping duties globally, despite criticism that it is too protectionist.
After the US, India was the second-largest user of such measures in 2023.
India launched 45 anti-dumping investigations and imposed duties in 14 cases in 2023, according to the World Tariff Profiles 2024. The US initiated 64 investigations and imposed additional levies in 14 cases.
The anti-dumping measures in India are mostly aimed at China.
“This is not surprising as China is the largest import source for India,” noted Dr Biswajit Dhar, a trade expert and distinguished professor of the Council for Social Development, a research and advocacy institution.
“Anti-dumping has become popular with the Indian industry. They actually see certain advantages in the imposition of anti-dumping duty,” Dr Dhar said.
In the 2023 to 2024 financial year, China was India’s biggest trade partner, with bilateral trade amounting to US$118.4 billion, and India faced a trade deficit of US$85 billion.
Anti-dumping duties imposed by India on some speciality chemicals, such as sodium hydrosulfite – a reducing agent used in industries like textile dyeing – have been credited with boosting domestic production.
According to an India report by Ernst & Young, the speciality chemical industry is projected to reach US$300 billion by the financial year 2025, growing at an annual rate of 9 per cent.
Still, the anti-dumping duties have sent ripples through the domestic market.
Mr Sushant Verma, an Indian wholesaler who also imports water bottles from China, said retailers were already stocking up, fearful of a spike in prices, which he believes would hit the lower middle-class most.
“I used to sell 10,000 vacuum bottles in a week, now it has increased to 15,000… Most retailers are building up stock before prices go up,” said the owner of Iconic Pentagon, based in Faridabad in Haryana state. He added that prices had already increased by 10 per cent.
Mr Verma predicted that the small manufacturing base in India would further drive up prices.
“If you talk about northern India, we have only two or three good manufacturers. The others are all small workshops that produce bottles where the insulation is not so good.”
Will China dump more goods after US tariff moves?
Mr Pai noted that India’s latest anti-dumping duties are “a continuation of its efforts to rein in its burgeoning trade deficit with China”.
The duties also come at a time of growing global protectionism. On April 2, US President Donald Trump is expected to slap retaliatory levies on a number of countries, including India.
New Delhi is concerned about the possibility of Chinese goods being dumped in India as a result of the US’ reciprocal tariffs.
“Every country is trying to protect its market. For India, reciprocal tariffs are on the way. We don’t know how it will hit us. So we need to see how best to protect markets,” Dr Dhar said.
India, like other countries, has also been exploring other measures to protect domestic industries, including the steel sector, following Mr Trump’s announcement of a 25 per cent US tariff on imports of steel and aluminium.
The Commerce Ministry has recommended a 12 per cent safeguard duty on select steel imports for 200 days in order to protect India’s steel industry.
Concerns have arisen over the potential dumping of Chinese steel in India, amid an already saturated global market.
In one glimpse of the complexities involved in protectionist measures, steelmakers in India have welcomed the move, but small and medium-sized enterprises in the engineering sector are concerned that a hike in import duties on steel would raise the costs of their products and, in turn, harm exports.
Experts expect a range of protectionist measures to be implemented wherever possible to protect Indian manufacturers.
“Every country has its antenna up,” Dr Dhar said.
“Since there is a certain element of inevitability in the way things are panning out, I think wherever possible, India will become more cautious (in protecting domestic industries).”
Anti-dumping duties on 5 Chinese goods
1. Vacuum insulated flask
– Duty of US$1,732 per tonne for five years
2. Aluminium foil
– Provisional duty of US$873 per tonne for six months
3. Trichloroisocyanuric acid (for treating water)
– Duty of up to US$986 per tonne for five years
4. Soft ferrite cores (for electric vehicles, chargers and telecommunication devices)
– Duty of 35 per cent was imposed on cost, insurance and freight value for five years
5. Polyvinyl chloride paste resin (plastic material used in many applications)
– Duty of up to US$707 per tonne for five years
Source: Press Trust of India
- Nirmala Ganapathy is India bureau chief at The Straits Times. She is based in New Delhi and writes about India’s foreign policy and politics.