Commerce Drops Hyundai's AD Rate After Accepting Service-Related Revenue Data on Remand at CIT
The Commerce Department, on remand at the Court of International Trade, incorporated information from antidumping duty respondent Hyundai Heavy Industries Co. regarding its service-related revenues and expenses, slashing the exporter's dumping rate from 16.13% to 4.69%. Commerce solicited this information from the company after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit told the agency to let Hyundai supplement the record (Hitachi Energy USA v. U.S., CIT # 16-00054).
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The case, on the 2013-14 administrative review of the AD order on large power transformers from South Korea, concerns Commerce's methodology for valuing service-related revenue in setting normal value and sales price. Initially on remand at CIT, Hyundai asked the agency to allow it to submit additional data -- a request that Commerce denied after finding Hyundai failed to respond to the best of its ability in the review and hitting it with an adverse facts available rate.
Commerce said its capping methodology doesn't rely on whether a respondent provides the service under the terms of sale as Hyundai suggests but whether the services were provided and the revenue for those services exceeds the cost of the services. The Federal Circuit reversed this move, finding that the rejection of Hyundai's submissions was an impermissible basis for AFA (see 2205240028).
On remand, the agency issued a request to Hyundai for the company's full sales documents that have revised home market and U.S. sales databases that include all service-related revenues and their expenses, where such revenues and expenses "are contained in customer-facing documentation generated as part of the sales process." Using the data, Commerce employed its capping methodology, leading to the drop in Hyundai's AD rate.
Hyundai submitted comments on the draft remand results, arguing that the agency committed two ministerial errors in calculating the dumping margin. The errors involved installation expenses where Commerce calculated this variable but did not use it as part of the capping program language and the listing of an incorrect figure for the quantity of merchandise sold by Hyundai during the review period. Commerce agreed with the respondent and said it corrected the errors as part of the final remand results, though the agency did not implement Hyundai's suggestion that Commerce use certain net expense variables in the margin calculation.