Korean Steel Exporter Rails Against AD Petitioner's Bid to Toss Suit for Lack of Injury
Antidumping petitioner Nucor Tubular Products' motion to dismiss a suit on an AD review of steel pipes and tubes from South Korea fails to consider all of exporter HiSteel's claims, the exporter argued in a reply brief at the Court of International Trade. While Nucor claims a Commerce Department reversal of its adjustments to HiSteel's costs and scrap offset as a result of the transactions disregarded rule will not change the company's margin, HiSteel said the true effect on its margin is unknown given its remaining claim against Commerce's differential pricing analysis (DPA) (HiSteel v. U.S., CIT # 22-00142).
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HiSteel said it's possible the agency may change its methodology on remand to "use a different cutoff that accounts for the statistical characteristics of the underlying data," should the DPA challenge prove successful. "Such a change will necessarily change the margin calculation, and the effect of reversing the adjustments to HiSteel’s costs and scrap offset on that revised margin may very well move the needle," the brief said.
The exporter said that while the final change to the margin by correcting each of Commerce's alleged errors is unknown, "it is undisputed that each of the errors affect the margin." HiSteel added that a "party does not need to demonstrate a present injury that is redressable by the Court if the action being challenged is capable of repetition yet evading review," as is the case with Commerce's transactions disregarded rule in the present case.
In Commerce's final calculation of HiSteel's margin, it applied an adjustment to account for undervalued slitting charges from an affiliate. To implement this adjustment, Commerce created a "transactions-disregarded adjustment" field and effectively increased HiSteel's cost of manufacturing. Commerce also made an adjustment to account for scrap sold to an affiliate at an above-market rate and created a similar "scrap adjustment" field.