Japanese Steel Exporter Says Commerce Used Wrong Date of Sale in AD Review
The Commerce Department erred in changing the date of sale for respondent Toyo Kohan Co.'s U.S. transactions in the 2022-23 review of the antidumping duty order on diffusion-annealed nickel-plated flat-rolled steel from Japan, the company said in a complaint at the Court of International Trade. The exporter said Commerce "did not justify" its change from using the date of invoice as the date of sale to using the shipment date from Japan as the date of sale (Toyo Kohan Co. v. United States, CIT # 24-00261).
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
In the review's preliminary determination, Commerce set a 12.69% dumping rate for Toyo Kohan and used the date of invoice as the date of sale. In its final results, the agency said that since "material terms of sale did not change between the shipment date and invoice date," Commerce used the shipment date instead of the inovice date, as it had done for previous review periods. The end result was a 4.44% AD rate for Toyo Kohan.
Taking to CIT, the respondent said Commerce will normally use the invoice date as the date of sale. However, after initially using the invoice date for this purpose, the agency then switched to using the shipment date without proper justification.
Commerce only cited one "U.S. sales trace document and nothing else on the record" and said that since material terms of sale didn't change between the shipment and invoice dates, the shipment date was proper. The agency "said nothing about the extensive record evidence showing that the material terms had changed," Toyo Kohan said. The exporter specifically said Commerce didn't address data submitted in one field of its Section C database that showed that around half of the U.S. sales prices "showed changes between the shipment date and invoice date."