The Ministry of Commerce said it launched an anti-dumping case into US and Russian imports of grain-oriented flat-rolled electrical steel, a soft magnetic material used in transformers, rectifiers and reactors, from June 1 in response to applications from Wisco and Baosteel, with an investigation period from March 1, 2008 to February 28, 2009. China consumed about 680,000 tons of GO electrical steel last year, and imported 59,000 tons from the US and 79,900 tons from Russia. The total imports from the two countries were 64.74 percent more than those in 2007. The imports in the first two months of this year were up 22.85 percent year-on-year.