Commerce Slightly Ups Chinese Mobile Access Equipment Exporters' AD Margin on Remand
The Commerce Department announced that it increased the antidumping margin for a mandatory respondent and nonselected respondents in remand results of a review on mobile access equipment from China after recalculating costs for accuracy. The mandatory respondent’s rate rose from 31.7% to 37.2%, while the nonselected respondents’ rose from 51.83% to 56.5% (Coalition of American Manufacturers of Mobile Access Equipment v. U.S., CIT Consol. # 22-00152).
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The Court of International Trade had sent back Commerce’s selection of mandatory respondent Zhejiang Dingli Machinery Co.’s surrogate values for ocean shipping costs and fabricated steel inputs (see 2406030039).
Regarding Commerce’s treatment of Dingli’s shipping costs, CIT Judge M. Miller Baker said the department wasn’t allowed to do “what it did here” -- accept Dingli’s designation of its routes as business proprietary information, then find the label was wrongly applied and thus entirely reject the data “because of the agency’s preference for using publicly available data.”
The review’s petitioner, Coalition of American Manufacturers of Mobile Access Equipment, advocated for the department to use its own “Maersk” data, which was designated as business proprietary information “stemming from Dingli designating its ocean shipping routes as BPI.” The court agreed that the Maersk data was more specific, so Commerce switched to using it in its results upon remand.
The surrogate values Commerce chose for Dingli’s fabricated steel components, meanwhile, were “internally inconsistent,” as some of the Harmonized System headings Commerce relied on, offered by Dingli, were related to base steel plate rather than more processed fabricated steel. The court held that it was inconsistent that Commerce had found that some of Dingli’s suppliers did “more in-depth fabrication” while still holding that there was “no evidence on the record demonstrating that the suppliers provided fabricated steel components.”
On remand, Commerce switched to using a Harmonized System subheading that covered fabricated steel inputs. It did reject the coalition’s preferred heading, calling it less accurate.