Senators Press Commerce on Investigation into South Korean OCTG Exports
The Commerce Department should slap antidumping duties on South Korean oil country tubular goods (OCTG) imports to the “fullest extent of the law” in its final determination, said 56 Senators led by Sens. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Rob Portman, R-Ohio in a May 15 letter. Commerce preliminarily determined in February that South Korean companies did not dump the goods into the U.S. market. The final determination is currently due July 10.
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The agency may have used faulty information for the preliminary determination, the letter said. “Korea has one of the world’s largest steel industries but no domestic OCTG market. The result is that Korean producers are exporting an increasing volume of OCTG to the United States,” said the letter addressed to Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker. “We are concerned that certain information used for the preliminary determination did not fully reflect the costs of production and sales for the Korean producers, such as profit information based on lower valued pipe products and certain affiliation issues that may impact which sales are used as the basis for the dumping calculation.”
The case involves eight other countries, but South Korea exports the lion’s share of U.S. imports of the product. U.S. domestic sales of steel necessary for the growing U.S. energy market, such as OCTG, are hampered by increasing foreign competition, said the letter. For AD duties to be imposed, the International Trade Commission will also have to issue a final affirmative injury determination. The ITC in August 2013 preliminarily decided South Korean dumping could be causing injury in U.S. industry (see 13081629).