Exporter Says Commerce Ignored Fact It Stopped Production Early in Review Period
In a motion for judgment, exporter CS Wind Malaysia again said the Commerce Department should have adjusted its manufacturing costs for a production stoppage throughout most of the period of an administrative review of an antidumping duty order (see 2409090008) (CS Wind Malaysia v. U.S., CIT # 24-00150).
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The Malaysian wind tower exporter said it reported “highly abnormal production costs” after stopping production in March 2022, only four months after the start of the review period. It said it reported this to Commerce in its questionnaire response, explaining that its conversion costs, as a result, were unusually high due to its low production numbers. It therefore added a cost adjustment to its response, it said.
But the department removed that cost adjustment prior to releasing its preliminary results, the exporter said. Without explaining its reasoning, and despite agreeing that the shutdown was permanent, Commerce instead “excluded only a small amount of actual post-shutdown costs incurred during the” review period, CS Wind said.
“Thus, CS Wind was left to guess as to why Commerce disallowed the downward cost adjustment,” it said.
It argued the department was statutorily required to make such adjustments when relying solely on a respondent’s own books and records would be unreasonable. Commerce also has done so in past reviews, it said, and “inexplicably deviated from its past practice” for the review in question.
The exporter also took issue with Commerce’s selection of surrogates for CS Wind’s profit ratio. It said neither of the two surrogates the department selected, Malaysian steel trading group Mycron and Malaysian welded steel pipe manufacturer Alpine, produced merchandise comparable to wind towers.
Commerce, it said, wrongly claimed that both companies produce “hollow structures and steel pipes that are comparable to subject merchandise” and that they “predominantly” derive their profits from sales of those products even though substantial evidence suggested otherwise.
The department relied on the petitioner’s submission of “the consolidated statements of a holding company” rather than “the standalone statements of a large diameter pipe producer,” it said.
But Mycron’s business is primarily concerned with “investment holding” and providing “management services” to subsidiaries, CS Wind claimed. And most of the revenue generated by Mycron and its three subsidiaries comes from cold-rolled steel coils, “which is not at all comparable to utility scale wind towers,” it said.
It pointed out that the department rejected another potential surrogate as “a conglomerate that principally engaged in investment holding,” but didn’t “extend this same logic to Mycron.”
And Alpine doesn’t produce comparable merchandise, as it lacks both similar business operations and a similar customer base, the exporter claimed.