Sefcovic: Deal on Tariffs with USA Good News Also for Slovak Carmakers

Brussels, 28 July (TASR-correspondent) - Both the EU and the United States have been trying to find a deal so that trade can continue, EU Trade Commissioner Maros Sefcovic said in an interview with Slovak media in Brussels on Monday, adding that cutting tariffs on cars will also help Slovakia. Sefcovic explained that the European Commission wanted to preserve jobs in Europe, which were threatened by Washington's previous 30-percent tariff proposal, and to seek solutions to all the complicated issues it had been discussing with its US counterparts over the past six months. Asked how the EU would react to the agreed 15-percent export tariffs on its exports and what tariff practices it would introduce against the Americans, Sefcovic pointed out that Sunday's (27 July) negotiations were focused on how to balance the mutual trade balance, when the EU has the second largest trade surplus from the point of view of the USA (after China). The EU commissioner said that imports of US goods into the EU should be maintained in similar quantities as before and under the same or slightly reduced tariff conditions. He appreciated that in sensitive items such as steel and ferro-alloys, both sides were interested in forming a kind of union or association in which they would trade at low or zero tariffs, but at the same time act together against third countries that flood Europe and the US with often illegally subsidised products from this area. "It was clear that if we wanted to maintain healthy trade relations without any dramatic fluctuations, we had to look for ways to achieve a more balanced trade balance. We were looking at areas where tariffs could be reduced for particular products," he stated. Sefcovic added that the agreed 15-percent tariff cap is also a guarantee from the US that there will be no further tariff increases, which is good news for the automotive, pharmaceutical and semiconductor industries. In these areas, which are important for the EU, the US was expected to demand much higher tariffs than 15 percent. "The overall compromise is the best we could negotiate at this time and I believe it opens the way for closer cooperation in the future," he noted. The Slovak commissioner stressed that the agreement in Scotland between Donald Trump and Ursula von der Leyen is good news for the automotive industry, which was originally supposed to be burdened with 27.5-percent tariffs on exports to the US. He pointed out that representatives of European car manufacturers claimed that they were "bleeding" at a 27.5-percent burden because such a rate represented daily losses of millions of euros. am/mcs