'Unfinished,' 'Rough' and 'Bent' Pipe Fittings All the Same Thing, Producers Argue in Remand Comments
Opposing the Commerce Department’s continued determination on remand that "rough" carbon steel butt-weld pipe fittings from China that were processed into finished fittings in Vietnam weren't of Chinese origin (see 2505050031), domestic producers Tube Forgings of America and Mills Iron Works again argued that “rough” pipe fittings are the same as “unfinished” ones (Tube Forgings of America, Inc. v. U.S., CIT Consol. # 23-00231).
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The department had held in a covered merchandise referral for an Enforce and Protect Act investigation that importer NORCA's "rough" pipe fittings, further processed in Vietnam, weren't within the scope of an antidumping duty order on Chinese-origin carbon steel butt-weld pipe fittings. The scope of the order covers "unfinished" pipe fittings, but Commerce found that "rough" pipe fittings weren't far along enough in the production process to be considered "unfinished."
Commerce’s most recent determination is contrary to both a previous ruling made regarding butt-weld pipe fittings from Thailand and “decades-long practice,” they said. The department also failed to follow the Court of International Trade’s instruction, in its remand order, to “answer the fundamental question” whether rough and unfinished pipe fittings are the same thing (see 2501020044), they claimed.
In its remand redetermination, the department called its prior use of the term “unfinished butt-weld pipe fittings” in its Thailand ruling a “mistake” and said that its “failure to explain clearly” that mistake in its initial Vietnam ruling “created confusion.”
But the actual Thailand circumvention ruling didn’t make a mistake, the producers argued. Rather, its interpretation of the orders fit with the intention of the orders’ petitioner to differentiate subject pipe fittings processed from “unfinished ‘as-formed’ pipe fittings” from China from non-subject merchandise.
This also “corroborates the sworn statements of industry executives that the term ‘unfinished’ embraces all butt-weld pipe fittings that have been formed into the rough shape of an elbow, tee, or reducer, but not processed to completion,” they said.
Commerce also claimed in its redetermination that it wasn’t treating similarly situated articles differently because the Thailand ruling came in a circumvention determination, while the Vietnam ruling is the result of a covered merchandise inquiry. But the Thailand ruling was made only after the department found that as-formed pipe fittings from China and processed in Thailand were subject to AD/CVD on Chinese-origin fittings, the producers said; this was a “foundational element” of the circumvention determination that “was not dependent on the nature” of it.
The two producers also claimed that Commerce’s redetermination put too much emphasis on certain aspects of the original petitions’ language while ignoring others.
For instance, they argued, the reason the term “rough fitting” doesn’t actually appear in the petitions for the pipe fitting AD/CVD orders in question is because “common industry usage made it unnecessary to do so.” This is supported by testimony by industry executives and Vietnamese producers’ own records, they claimed.
Meanwhile, the fact that the orders’ petitions only begin to use the phrase “unfinished fitting” when describing the fittings’ second manufacturing stage isn’t “meaningful,” either, they said, because the petitioner had previously identified subject merchandise “in terms of their physical characteristics,” as required by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit decision King Supply Company.
Commerce’s interpretation of the petitions’ use of the term “bent pipe” as meaning the same thing as a “rough fitting” -- a pipe that has only undergone the first stage in the manufacturing process -- is also unsupportable, they argued. Evidence from industry executives again shows that both these “bent pipes” and “rough fittings” are the equivalent of “unfinished fittings” because they are “useless for any other purpose” than being processed into finished pipe fittings, they said.
And although Commerce argued that “one would expect [the term ‘roughs’] would have appeared on the record of this case long before the [Enforce and Protect Act (EAPA)] inquiry” if it were a broadly used industry term, this is mere speculation, “not record evidence,” the producers said.
They also noted that the petitioner had, during the original investigation, submitted a post-initiation clarification that it wanted “[u]nfinished butt-weld pipe fittings that are not machined, not tooled, and not otherwise processed after forging” to still be included under the orders’ scope.
“This sentence unquestionably described rough fittings (or 'bent pipe'),” they said.