After Chinese manufacturers of engineered wood flooring challenged the antidumping duties set by the U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC), the Court of International Trade (CIT) ordered the DOC to recalculate the duties it set in June 2011 and provide and explanation of how it came to those numbers, according to Law360.
After Chinese manufacturers of engineered wood flooring challenged the antidumping duties set by the U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC), the Court of International Trade (CIT) ordered the DOC to recalculate the duties it set in June 2011 and provide and explanation of how it came to those numbers, according to Law360.
This is the latest development in a three-year saga that began when the Coalition for American Hardwood Parity (CAHP), a group of U.S. manufacturers of engineered wood flooring, filed a petition with the DOC requesting an investigation into unfair trade practices on the part of Chinese manufacturers. The petition asserted that U.S. manufacturers have suffered "material competitive injury" as a result of government-subsidized Chinese companies selling products below the market rate. The petition requested the U.S. government apply antidumping and countervailing duties of 100 percent on engineered wood flooring imports from China to "restore competitive parity in the U.S. market."
In March 2011, the June 2011, with the maximum duty reduced to 27.12 percent.
However, the CIT concluded even the lowered rates are arbitrarily high. The court ruled Wednesday that the DOC made a number of determinations that, without further explanation, were unreasonable. The case alleges that the DOC used a questionable data set as the basis for calculating surrogate values for core veneers.
"It follows that Commerce's decision to value core veneer at a price higher than face veneer, when both the record and common sense dictate that core veneers are less valuable than face veneers, is unreasonable," said the court decision.
