Statistical Proof That Trade Defense Remains Necessary in Colombia

In March 2018, the United States imposed 25% tariffs on Chinese steel under Section 232, seeking to protect its steel industry from a global overproduction that China cannot absorb internally. The measure worked in its immediate goal: Chinese steel exports to the U.S. market fell steadily. But the surplus did not disappear, it was redirected. Mirror statistics—the comparison between what a country declares it exports and what its trading partner declares it imports—show that, starting that same year, Colombia began receiving a systematically larger volume of Chinese steel than Beijing reports having sent. The steel case is not an isolated episode: it is the quantitative evidence of a pattern that today threatens any Colombian industry without active trade defense instruments.

UN Comtrade data for HS chapters 72 and 73 (2015-2024) document the phenomenon with precision. Between 2015 and 2019, Chinese steel exports to the United States fell 48%, while declared Colombian imports of steel of Chinese origin grew 86% between 2015 and 2022. The turning point is 2017: until that year the mirror gap was positive (Colombia declared receiving less than what China said it exported), but starting in 2018 it abruptly inverts and remains steadily negative, with an average of -US$929 million annually between 2018 and 2023 and a peak of -US$1.361 billion in 2022. This inverted gap does not correspond to classic under-invoicing, but to triangulation: Chinese steel arrives re-shipped or minimally transformed through third countries, mainly Mexico (+58% as a steel supplier to Colombia in the same period) and Ukraine (+106%), which absorb the U.S. tariff and re-export toward markets without equivalent barriers.

The phenomenon is not limited to steel nor to a single country. When analyzing total trade between China, Mexico, and Colombia, the mirror gap remains and widens: in 2024 Mexico declared receiving US$39.2 billion more in Chinese manufactures than China reported having exported, and Colombia registered a gap of US$17.1 billion, with an annual average of -US$15.1 billion between 2018 and 2024. This behavior coincides with Chinese industrial deflation, whose producer price index has been in negative territory for two consecutive years (-0.3% in 2024), intensifying Beijing's need to place manufacturing surpluses in markets with lower containment capacity. Steel, with a relatively consolidated trade defense framework—tariffs, safeguards, and active monitoring—still shows structural leaks despite protection; the rest of the Latin American manufacturing industry, with much weaker or nonexistent instruments, is even more exposed.

For clients in sectors with exposure to Chinese manufacturing—auto parts, textiles, footwear, appliances, cosmetics, among others—the steel case must be read as a warning and not as a sector-specific anecdote. If even an industry with current tariffs and active traceability presents sustained mirror gaps of this magnitude, sectors without comparable trade defense measures face an even greater risk of displacement, under-invoicing, and loss of market share to triangulated products. The recommendation for the new administration—and for the associations representing these industries—is clear: maintain and strengthen existing trade defense instruments, extend the monitoring of mirror statistics to tariff headings currently without surveillance, and anticipate that Chinese export pressure, driven by its internal industrial deflation, will give no truce in the coming years. Lowering one's guard at this moment is not a neutral option: it is opening the door for the same pattern that currently affects steel to replicate, unchecked, in the rest of the national productive apparatus.

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References

United Nations Statistics Division. (2026). UN Comtrade Database (API v1) [Online database]. https://comtradeplus.un.org/

International Monetary Fund [IMF]. (2026). International Financial Statistics (IFS) [Online database]. https://data.imf.org/