Update [10th August 2020]: Despite many worrying views about the anti-dumping and future outlooks before it was enforced, we have heard from authoritative experts that exports to Saudi and other GCC markets are still not reduced much. The anti-dumping measures were imposed on 6th June. In spite of that during June 2020 the tiles exports from Morbi to only Saudi Arabia crossed 2.47 million square meters. It converts to approx 1600 containers!
Manoj Ughareja from Velsaa Vitrified LLP and Ashok Patel from Veritaas Granito have views that there is not much effect of the anti-dumping measure as it was anticipated earlier.
In the midst of paranoia created by the Covid-19 situation, there is another blow to Morbi’s flourishing ceramic tiles industry.
This time the news is from GCC (Gulf Co-operation Council), it is the largest export market for Indian tiles. So far so that many factories in Morbi were erected only considering the major chunk of GCC as a key export market for their tiles.
(FYI: GCC member countries are Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, and UAE)
…and it is fact. We have analyzed the export figures (ex-Mundra port) between April 2019 to January 2020 and found that GCC markets stand at # 1 position with consumption of 38% Indian tile exports (see below pie-chart).
We have also seen project reports of a few wall tiles factories (which they submit to avail bank loans). In such reports, they used to mention exports to Saudi Arabia as their 50% sales.
So much reliance on the single market has given a hard blow to many ceramic wall tiles factories in April 2020, when GCC market adopted 41.2% anti-dumping duty on 196 Morbi based tiles factories and whopping 106% on ALL other Indian factories (as well as exporters… see the table in the FAQ section below).
We have covered some important questions related to this anti-dumping measure by GCC.
| Rate of dumping duty on CIF value (%) | Indian origin | Chinese origin |
| Non sampling cooperating companies | 41.20% (196 Indian companies fall in this category) | 23.5% (89 Chinese companies fall in this category) |
| ALL other companies | 106% | 76% |