CIT Again Remands China Wooden Bedroom Furniture AD Review for Partial AFA Rate
The Court of International Trade again remanded the final results of the 2008 antidumping duty administrative review on wooden bedroom furniture from China (A-570-890), partly because of the partial adverse facts available (AFA) rate chosen for Chinese company Fairmont’s unreported sales.1 The court had first remanded the International Trade Administration’s final results in June 2012, for the ITA to reconsider Fairmont’s partial AFA rate, the surrogate wage rate, its use of a financial statement, and its use of zeroing (see 12060729). On remand, the ITA recalculated the wage rate and adequately explained its use of zeroing, but failed to implement the court’s orders on Fairmont’s partial AFA rate and the use of the financial statement.
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The partial AFA rate assigned to Fairmont resulted from the company’s failure to report six sales that it had argued were not of subject merchandise. In June, CIT accepted the ITA’s use of AFA for those six sales, but rejected the 216.01 percent rate chosen for those sales because the ITA didn’t justify why those six sales would have been dumped at a significantly higher rate than Fairmont’s other sales. The record indicated Fairmont’s other sales had been dumped at a rate of about 34 percent.
On remand, the ITA recalculated the rate, using Fairmont’s own data, finding product-specific AD rates of between 134.42 and 215.51 percent for each product. But the ITA again failed to justify why the partial AFA rates for the six sales were so much higher than the calculated rates for the sales Fairmont had reported. When viewed in combination with the extremely high level of the rates, the partial AFA rates were also derived from an unreasonably miniscule portion of Fairmont’s sales, the court said -- the margins were based about 0.1 percent of Fairmont’s total sales by quantity and 0.05 percent by value.
1Fairmont includes Dongguan Sunrise Furniture Co., Ltd.; Taicang Sunrise Wood Industry Co., Ltd.; Taicang Fairmont Designs Furniture Co., Ltd.; and Meizhou Sunrise Furniture Co., Ltd.
(Dongguan Sunrise Furniture Co., Ltd. v. United States, Slip Op. 13-46, dated 04/05/13, Judge Restani)