CIT Says Commerce Reasonably Picked Nail Maker's Financial Statements to Calculate CV
The Commerce Department reasonably picked the financial statements of San Shing Fastech Corp. to calculate the constructed value profit and indirect selling expenses of respondent Your Standing International in a review of the antidumping duty order on nails from Taiwan, the Court of International Trade held in a Feb. 7 decision. Judge Claire Kelly said the agency appropriately found that San Shing makes "comparable merchandise," has contemporaneous financial statements and sells over 70% of its products to markets outside the U.S.
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Kelly added that Your Standing failed to exhaust its administrative remedies regarding its claim that San Shing and the respondent "lack a similar customer base." The result is a 26.28% AD rate for Your Standing.
In the review, petitioner Mid Continent Steel & Wire submitted financial statements from two Taiwanese companies and two Indian companies to calculate CV profit and selling expenses for Your Standing. Commerce ultimately chose the statements of San Shing and Chun YuWorks & Co., finding that San Shing makes comparable merchandise, has contemporaneous statements and sells over 70% of its goods to non-U.S. markets.
Your Standing challenged the selection, arguing that San Shing's statements don't reflect "sales in the home market of Taiwan" and that San Shing and Your Standing don't share a similar customer base.
Kelly reviewed Commerce's decision by first looking to the statute, which tells the agency to use "any other reasonable method" to calculate CV if the respondent doesn't have home market or third country sales. The statute contains a limit, which says the agency can't use an amount for profit that exceeds the amount normally realized by exporters or producers.
The court held that this limit "contains no geographical distinction." Kelly added that the law doesn't require that "data be for the specific exporter or producer or that the data relate to foreign-like products." The judge said this lack of a geographical restriction "enables Commerce to consider the geographical source of the data as one non-dispositive factor in Commerce’s analysis," adding that the statute gives the agency "considerable discretion to choose financial statements on a case-by-case basis."
Kelly said Commerce "reasonably exercised its discretion" in explaining that there were no other statements on the record that gave evidence of sales "made predominantly in Taiwan." The judge noted the agency's rationale for its decision as sufficiently reasonable.
The judge rejected Your Standing's claim that the lack of comparability between products made by San Shing and Your Standing "exacerbates problems with the financial statutes." The respondent said it's "highly plausible" that San Shing's sales to Taiwan were made of sales of non-comparable merchandise. Kelly said Commerce reasonably found that San Shing is a Taiwanese manufacturer of comparable merchandise, since 83% of its sales are made of fastener products.
As for Your Standing's claim that it has a different customer base than San Shing, Kelly said the respondent failed to raise the issue during the review. While Your Standing said administratively that San Shing is mainly devoted to automated products and doesn't have material sales in Taiwan, the court said these claims "raise concerns only about the first and second factors Commerce considers when calculating a CV rate" and not about the agency's fourth factor -- "the similarity of the customer bases."
Your Standing said its claim regarding the customer bases is an "extension" of its claim that San Shing's statements shouldn't be included in the CV calculation. Kelly said that while the respondent generally argued against the use of San Shing's statements, "it did not give Commerce the opportunity to address the narrow issue of the different customer bases in its Agency Brief."
(Your Standing International Inc. v. United States, Slip Op. 25-14, CIT # 24-00055, dated 02/07/25; Judge: Claire Kelly; Attorneys: Lizbeth Levinson of Fox Rothschild for plaintiff Your Standing International Inc.; Katy Bartelma for defendant U.S. government; Rosa Jeong of Greenberg Traurig for defendant-intervenor Mid Continent Steel & Wire, Inc.)