By leading a six-point agenda with trade remedies, import control and mandatory SNI, new Indonesian Iron & Steel Industry Association (IISIA) chairman Willgo Zainar says the industry can win stronger protection. He is also president director of Krakatau Steel, so the association’s lobbying line and a producer’s commercial interest now share a leader. He replaces Akbar Djohan for 2026–2030.
The remaining items are local-content effectiveness under TKDN and P3DN, energy supply capacity and competitiveness, long-term raw-material availability and fiscal and investment incentives. Energy, raw materials and incentives lower what it costs a mill to make steel. These are producer requests of government and reach buyers only if savings are passed on. Trade remedies and mandatory SNI work the other way, by limiting what can be bought, and they are the levers a contractor will feel first.
Local-content rules sit between the two groups. Greater use of domestic products helps mills, but where such rules apply to a project they narrow a contractor’s sourcing choice and weaken its hand in price talks. Zainar has not said which products or projects would be covered, or how far mandatory SNI would be widened, so the cost to buyers cannot yet be sized. His call for cohesion across the industry is aimed at steel players, and contractors who buy the steel are not obviously among the interests the agenda weighs.
The one live case covers galvanised steel
The only trade-remedy case on the table shows both the logic and the limits. Indonesia’s Anti-Dumping Committee (KADI) opened an antidumping investigation into galvanised steel imports from China on 15 September, on an application from domestic producers Tata Metal Lestari and ArcelorMittal Nippon Steel Indonesia, not Krakatau. It covers 9 HS codes.
The evidence for protection is real on its face. During 2023–2025 Indonesia imported 2.56 million tonnes of the products concerned, of which 2.08 million tonnes, approximately 81 per cent, came from China, and by 2025 Chinese products had accounted for approximately 52 per cent of domestic consumption. Over the same period the petitioners’ selling prices fell by a cumulative 21 per cent while cost of goods sold declined by only 14 per cent, and Chinese prices were lower than theirs in every year. The applicant and supporting enterprises together account for approximately 76 per cent of domestic production, and no producer opposed the application.
That is a case for galvanised steel, not for the whole agenda. The product is a standard construction material, widely used in roof trusses, roofing and wall cladding, but the case does not test rebar or other long products, or how far infrastructure demand absorbs domestic output. The agenda is not shown to be a general driver of construction steel prices. What a duty would do is narrower and easier to forecast: fabricators and contractors in roofing and cladding would face a higher entry price for the cheapest supply, in a product where price is the primary purchasing consideration.
No duties have been imposed. The investigation runs up to 12 months, extendable to 18 months, and provisional measures may come no earlier than around 14 November. Buyers of galvanised steel should price that window into quotations and contract adjustment clauses, and ask suppliers how much of their stock is Chinese. The next signals are whether IISIA sponsors cases on long products, which products come under mandatory SNI, and whether Krakatau’s interests diverge from those of rival mills when remedy requests multiply. Until those show, the agenda is a statement of producer priorities, and the price effect is evidenced only for galvanised flats.