Magnesium Exporter Challenges Pick of Turkey Over Bulgaria as Surrogate in AD Review
The Commerce Department erred in selecting Turkey and not Bulgaria as the main surrogate country in the 2022-23 review of the antidumping duty order on pure magnesium from China, exporters Tianjin Magnesium International Co. and Tianjin Magnesium Metal Co. argued in a Jan. 27 complaint at the Court of International Trade (Tianjin Magnesium International Co. v. United States, CIT # 25-00002).
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In the review, Tianjin Magnesium was picked as a mandatory respondent and ultimately received a 25.26% AD rate. In assessing which surrogate nation to pick, Commerce found that Bulgaria isn't a significant producer of subject merchandise, opting to use data from Turkey instead.
Tianjin Magnesium now challenges this finding at the trade court, arguing that both it and the U.S. industry put export data on the record showing that Bulgaria had significant exports of subject merchandise -- a fact that Commerce itself confirmed. As a result, the rejection of Bulgaria as a surrogate nation is "flawed," the brief said.
The respondent added that Commerce's finding "based on limited data that Turkey was a producer of identical merchandise is not relevant," since the agency didn't use data from a producer of identical merchandise.
Commerce also erred in using "out-of-period data, where the in-period data relied upon in prior reviews was present," the complaint said. The agency "must have a good reason for making a change from prior methodology," Tianjin Magnesium argued. And where Commerce has two sources of data, one within the review period and one outside of it, the agency can't prefer the out-of-period data "without good cause," the company said.
The data for Turkey was also bogged down by a "high rate of inflation," "aberrational prices for key inputs, price differences based on differences in the nature of goods, and the absence of key data in the financial statements," the respondent argued. The Bulgarian data didn't have these flaws, and Commerce failed to address the flaws, the brief said.