On Remand, Commerce Continues to Deny Double Remedies Adjustment to Aluminum Exporter
In remand results published Dec. 15, the Commerce Department maintained its refusal to grant exporter Dingsheng Aluminum Industries Group a double remedies adjustment in its countervailing duty administrative review on aluminum foil from China (Jiangsu Dingsheng New Materials Joint-Stock Co. v. U.S., CIT # 23-00264).
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The Court of International Trade ruled in July that, when identifying the existence of a double remedy, Commerce should have calculated a countervailable subsidy's potential price impact -- not looked to whether prices actually declined during the review period (see 2507280063).
In its new remand results, the department said it did so. As a result, it said, it had to move on to the next stage of its double remedies analysis.
Examining the mandatory respondent's provided information, it determined that the exporter couldn't demonstrate that the four subsidies for which it was seeking the adjustment were related to manufacturing costs.
Specifically, Dingsheng failed to provide adequate documentation, it said. For example, the exporter didn't comply with a Double Remedies Questionnaire prompt instructing it to "explain how many times you identified a change in this cost item during the relevant time period" with "full documentary support for each." Instead, it said, Dingsheng provided a "general statement that the 'prices of major inputs ... continuously fluctuate according to the prevailing market conditions.'"
The fact that Dingsheng consumed raw materials and electricity that Dingsheng claimed were made cheaper by countervailable subsidies wasn't enough to prove a "subsidy-to-cost link," it said. The exporter still needed to provide "additional documentation to demonstrate the extent to which input costs were affected by subsidies," it said.
Dingsheng also hadn't offered enough evidence to show a "cost-to-price" link, the department said. Though it "provided minutes from a production and sales meeting" in which employees apparently identified decreasing input costs as driving the exporter to drop its prices, the data from the period shows that prices didn't actually drop, Commerce said.
Further, the department said that, based on correspondence between Dingsheng and its customers, it could identify other reasons that customers' prices changed over the review period, though it redacted those reasons from the public version of its results.