Commerce Upholds Quarterly Cost Analysis, de Minimis Rate for Steel Plate Exporter
Responding to a second remand order by the Court of International Trade, the Commerce Department again chose to calculate review respondent Officine Technosider’s costs quarterly, rather than annually. It said its decision made sense despite the “unique situation” in which Commerce had access to only one quarter of Officine’s U.S. sales data (Officine Tecnosider SRL v. U.S., CIT Consol. # 23-00001).
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The department can switch to a quarterly analysis of an exporter's costs when that exporter faces certain high production cost fluctuations. It did so after its first voluntary remand of the current review at the behest of Officine, ultimately granting the steel plate exporter a de minimis rate (see 2309120010).
But if it intends to conduct a quarterly cost analysis, Commerce must first establish linkages between an exporter’s vacillating costs of production and sales prices. Defendant-intervenor Nucor Corporation pushed back, saying it couldn’t do so accurately because Officine only made U.S. sales in the third quarter of the review period. Ordering Commerce to change tacks or better justify its reasoning, CIT remanded the review for a second time in September (see 2409170068).
Commerce said in its remand results that it “adjusted” its method of attack “to account for [Officine’s atypical dataset and expanded our linkage analysis of home market control numbers (CONNUMS) from five CONNUMS to 10.” It further detailed “the importance of examining the pricing behaviors of a respondent faced with significant cost changes,” it said.
It said when weighing a respondent’s pricing practices, it “does not place more weight on the pricing practices of one market over the other,” focusing instead on establishing whether quarterly sales and input prices “trend in the same direction more often than not.”
In this case, its analysis of the largest home market CONNUMS for Officine “gives Commerce sufficient insight” into Officine’s pricing practices, it said.
And it claimed it had made similar decisions in other proceedings. For example, it said that it hadn’t had access to any U.S. sales data in an administrative review of circular welded pipe from Turkey, but it had still been able to resort to a quarterly cost analysis after expanding the number of home market CONNUMs it examined in its linkage review from five to 10. It did the exact opposite in a review of welded line pipe from Korea, using solely 10 U.S. CONNUMs to conduct a linkage and significance analysis because “there was no viable comparison market.”