Thank you, Mr President: BlueScope gets a windfall from Trump’s tariffs

October 28, 2026 — 12:12pm

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Australian steel giant BlueScope raised its earnings forecast significantly this week, driven largely by a near 75 per cent increase in earnings from its North American mini-mill.

Its directors should send a thank-you card to Donald Trump. It’s his tariffs that are primarily responsible for US steel prices reaching their highest level in four years.

That was a foreseeable outcome, and one that was clearly foreseen by the BlueScope board when it repeatedly rejected takeover offers from the Stokes family’s business conglomerate SGH and North America’s Steel Dynamics earlier this year.

Given that BlueScope’s shares are now trading nearly 40 per cent above the price offered in the initial approach in December last year, and have exceeded the final, sweetened price in the $14.2 billion bid, it’s obvious that the company’s directors and their opportunistic suitors had a better understanding of what was happening in the US than BlueScope’s shareholders.

BlueScope’s experience is a good illustration of how tariffs affect an economy, and how destructive they can be for all but their direct beneficiaries – in this case the US domestic steel producers.

One of the first things Trump did after his inauguration last year was to slap 25 per cent tariffs on steel and aluminium imports, citing national security grounds.

In June last year, after a lower court ruled Trump’s broader “Liberation Day” tariffs illegal (a decision later reaffirmed by the US Supreme Court), Trump doubled the rate on steel and aluminium imports........

© The Sydney Morning Herald