US 'Myopically' Views Record in Determining Steel Exporter's US Dates of Sale, Exporter Argues
The U.S. "myopically" focused on a "single piece of evidence" regarding the proper date of sale of exporter Toyo Kohan's U.S. sales in the 2022-23 administrative review of the antidumping duty order on diffusion-annealed nickel-plate flat-rolled steel from Japan, Toyo Kohan argued in an Aug. 8 reply brief at the Court of International Trade. The government's brief centered on a statement in the exporter's questionnaire responses and the "price of a single example sales transaction" and says this focus is "reasonable," yet it's unreasonable to "ignore the second example in the same exhibit" that shows a price change, the brief said (Toyo Kohan Co. v. United States, CIT # 24-00261).
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It's also unreasonable "to ignore the remainder of the general discussion" in the questionnaire response "that makes explicit that the price at shipment is only tentative and is often not finalized until later when the final invoice is issued," the brief said. Commerce also erred in ignoring the "more specific discussion about U.S. prices" in another section of the exporter's questionnaire response "that also makes explicit the price at shipment is only a tentative price to be finalized later in the final invoice," Toyo Kohan said.
The company also said it's unreasonable to "ignore the actual U.S. prices at issue, since the U.S. price data here show that for more than half of the transactions, the price in fact did change after shipment."
The U.S. argued at CIT that when Toyo Kohan raised the date of sale issue, it described Commerce as “inadvertently” using shipment dates rather than invoice dates as the dates of sale for its U.S. transactions (see 2507140067). But Commerce actually conducted a comparison between the two sets of dates in its preliminary results and chose to rely on a "SALEDATU" field in Toyo Kohan’s dataset reflecting the earlier of those two options per U.S. sale, the government said.
The government said that while the exporter claimed that over half of its U.S. prices saw changes after shipment dates, these were only "internal accounting entries" known to the company meant to reconcile its sales and accounting records. The U.S. also said that Toyo Kohan failed to exhaust its claims on the date of sale during the review.
The exporter said in response that the government's exhaustion defense doesn't apply "when the party did not have a full and fair opportunity to present its arguments below, and the facts here show that was the case." The agency submitted no case brief to which the company could raise the date of sale issue, and its preliminary determination "was confusing," the brief said.