Commerce Wrongly Used Price Quotations Over Actual Transactions, Exporter Says
Opposing remand results by the Commerce Department (see 2410310052) -- which saw a company's antidumping duty rate rise from 31.7% to 37.2% in a review -- that company, mobile access equipment exporter Zhejiang Dingli Machinery, pushed back against Commerce’s use of a petitioner’s freight costs data. That data was composed of only price quotations, not actual transactions, the exporter argued (Coalition of American Manufacturers of Mobile Access Equipment v. United States, CIT Consol. # 22-00152).
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The Court of International Trade sent the case back to Commerce because the agency let Dingli submit its ocean shipping costs as business proprietary information, then found that the label was wrong and “cite[d] that error as a reason not to use the information because of the agency’s preference for using publicly available data” (see 2406030039). But it also found that the data submitted by petitioner Coalition of American Manufacturers of Mobile Access Equipment was more specific, so Commerce switched to using that on remand.
But the coalition’s “Maersk” data was “a mere price quote,” whereas the data for which Dingli was advocating reported sales prices “based on consummated commercial transactions,” Dingli said. For that reason, the Maersk data was much more unreliable.
All of the prices offered in the Maersk data contain the “boilerplate inscription” that “[r]ate information is an indication only,” the exporter noted. They also specify that each price “is not covered by a service contract,” it said. This “confirms that they are mere price quotations discovered from the actual ocean freight charges incurred by shippers during the period of investigation,” it said.
On the other hand, it said, the trade court itself confirmed Dingli’s preferred Descartes data was based on actual transactions, and the remand didn’t contest that the other two data sources Dingli wanted used, Freightos and Drewry data, were, too.
As Commerce has a “well-established policy favoring actual transaction-based price data,” this “constitutes a sufficient standalone reason to reject the Maersk price quotes in favor of the Descartes, Drewry, and Freightos actual transaction-based price data,” it said.
Just because the court ordered Commerce to consider route specificity in selecting the data it used didn’t mean the department was restricted to only consider route specificity, it said. It explained the remand order “was not so narrowly worded.”
Dingli also argued that its preferred data was nearly as route-specific as the Maersk data, so Commerce’s failure to consider it at all was a failure to “faithfully compare the strengths and weaknesses of each” data source it was considering in a review.
And the Maersk “price quotes” were all unreliable because they “all are associated with a boilerplate inscription of 18,000 Kg for 40 foot dry containers,” the exporter said.
“This payload is unrealistically low as compared to the prescribed industry standard payload of 28,800 Kg for a 40 foot container, published by Maersk itself,” it said. “In fact, the 18,000 Kg weight is even lower than the 28,200 Kg weight Maersk prescribes for its smaller size 20 foot containers.”
The exporter also took issue with Commerce’s valuation of minor fabricated components under Harmonized Tariff Schedule heading 8431, saying it “deviates from Commerce’s normal practice that favors a HTS subheading yielding a more reliable, representative, and accurate value even though it may not be the most suitable for classification purposes.”