Importer Asks Trade Court to Overturn ITC Injury Determination on Mattresses
The International Trade Commission didn't establish a connection between imports and injury to domestic industry in its antidumping duty investigations on mattresses from Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Serbia, Thailand, Turkey and Vietnam and a countervailing duty investigation on mattresses from China, an importer challenging the determinations said in a March 27 brief filed at the Court of International Trade. The ITC failed to establish that material injury to the domestic industry was “by reason of the subject imports” as required by the statute, CVB said in the brief (CVB v. United States, CIT #21-00288).
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CVB said that the commissioners failed to note that the U.S. mattress market is sharply segmented between markets for mattresses-in-a-box (MiBs) and flat-pack mattresses (FPMs), and didn't consider various market forces while performing its impact analysis. The company said that competition between the two segments is highly attenuated, and the MiB segment has experienced market growth during the period of interest, while the FPM segment has been in decline for several years. The ITC failed to note that the vast majority of subject imports are MiBs while the majority of U.S production consists of FPMs, the company said.
"To the extent U.S. producers’ volume and market share appear to have declined ... those losses were limited to FPMs ... because of shifts in consumer preferences." CVB said the MiB segment of the U.S. industry most closely competes with the subject imports but is also outperforming the FPM segment. That indicates that MiB performance overall, rather than entries from the countries under investigation, accounts for the relative decline in FPM consumption. "Since U.S. producers supply essentially all of the FPM market, it is U.S. producers who bore the brunt of the decline in demand for that product," the brief said. U.S. producers have actually gained market share over subject imports as a share of U.S. MiB consumption during the period of investigation, it said.
CVB also said that there are other significant non-price reasons for increases in subject imports, including instability and uncertainty of domestic mattress production and supply. Uncertainty of domestic production and supply were also determining factors in purchasing decisions and that the ITC report overemphasized the significance of price, the company said. The ITC also overestimated the ability of FPM producers to switch to MiB production, it said.