US Supports Commerce’s Finding Fish Fillet Exporter’s Sole Sale Bona Fide
The Commerce Department adequately determined an exporter’s single sale during a new shipper review’s period of review was bona fide, the U.S. said Feb. 12 (Catfish Farmers of America v. U.S., CIT # 24-00126).
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It said domestic producer Catfish Farmers of America was wrong to claim the sale wasn’t commercially reasonable and couldn’t turn a profit. Further, record evidence provided by exporter Co May’s unaffiliated U.S. customer, which went unnamed in the public version of the brief, demonstrated the customer had profitably resold the product, it said.
The producer’s “unpersuasive arguments were primarily based on CFA’s disagreement with Commerce’s data collection and how Co May’s unaffiliated customer reported expenses,” it said.
The sales price and quantity were both typical considering market conditions, falling “in the center of the distribution of the U.S. prices of the mandatory respondents,” the government argued. The fact the exporter made sales in other markets at a different price didn’t make its U.S. sale price aberrational, it said.
The price at which Co May’s customer ultimately resold the fish fillets also had no bearing on Commerce’s determination, per the statutory language, it said.
Catfish Farmers also argued that antidumping duty and countervailing duty cash deposits should have been deducted as expenses from Co May’s U.S. price, but the department never does that due to their “intangibility,” as cash deposits are merely estimates, it said.
And though Catfish Farmers took issue with the financial reporting of Co May’s U.S. customer, that customer adequately fulfilled the requests Commerce put to it, the government claimed.
It also said Catfish Farmers hadn’t exhausted its claim that Co May’s U.S. customer was affiliated with the entity to which it resold Co May’s fish fillets. The domestic producer based its argument on the fact that the reseller and downstream purchaser shared an address, but record evidence indicated the sale had been conducted at arm’s length and Catfish Farmers only offered “two Wikipedia-style articles in rebuttal of Co May’s documentation,” the U.S. said.