AD/CVD Petitioners Challenge ITC's Negative Injury Finding on Aluminum Extrusions at CIT
Antidumping duty and countervailing duty petitioners the U.S. Aluminum Extruders Coalition and United Steelworkers argued that the International Trade Commission incorrectly concluded that aluminum extrusions from China, Colombia, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Italy, Malaysia, Mexico, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Vietnam didn't injure the U.S. industry (U.S. Aluminum Extruders Coalition v. United States, CIT # 24-00209).
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Filing a complaint at the Court of International Trade on Dec. 24, the petitioners said, among other things, that the ITC's decision that domestic industry supply constraints caused the U.S. industry's decline in performance wasn't backed by substantial evidence.
During the injury proceedings, the petitioners claimed that aluminum extrusions imports from the covered nations "had adverse effects on U.S. prices, including by underselling the domestic like product," injuring the domestic industry. The petitioners "highlighted numerous discrepancies and distortions in the pricing product data collected in the final phase of the investigation" and said that, after correcting "for the most obvious errors," the data shows serious underselling.
The petitioners said the commission recognized "certain errors in the data and attempted to reach out to parties and made numerous corrections," but ultimately failed to correct "most of the flaws" in its final staff report. As a result, the petitioners said, the ITC "should place less weight on the pricing product data and rely on other substantial record evidence showing that subject imports undersold the domestic like product and had adverse price effects on the domestic like product."
The ITC then found, in a 2-1 vote, that the U.S. industry wasn't injured by the subject imports. The majority said that while the volume of subject imports is significant relative to the consumption in the U.S., it found that this volume didn't have a significant adverse impact on the price of extrusions in the U.S. or on the U.S. industry.
Regarding price effects, the commission said the imports didn't undersell the domestic like product significantly or depress prices "to a significant degree." The majority added that there's "not a causal nexus between subject imports and declines in the domestic industry’s performance" during the investigation period, noting declines in U.S. producers' output explained by "domestic industry supply constraints in 2021 and 2022 and decline in apparent U.S. consumption and an increase in nonsubject imports’ market share from 2022 to 2023."
The complaint summarily said all of the commission's findings are not backed by susbstantial evidence.