ITC Respondents Defend Negative Injury Finding on Aluminum Extrusions at CIT
Respondents, led by the Coalition for Fair Mexican Exports of Aluminum Extrusions, defended the International Trade Commission's negative injury finding regarding aluminum extrusions from 14 countries, in a Sept. 16 reply brief at the Court of International Trade. The coalition argued that the ITC properly supported its findings that the subject imports didn't have "significant price effects" nor did they have a "significant adverse impact on the domestic industry" (U.S. Aluminum Extruders Coalition v. United States, CIT Consol. # 24-00209).
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Various petitioners, led by the U.S. Aluminum Extruders Coalition, launched their case at the end of 2024 to contest the negative injury finding on aluminum extrusions from China, Colombia, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Italy, Malaysia, Mexico, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Vietnam (see 2412240033). The petitioners highlighted supposed "discrepancies and distortions in the pricing product data collected in the final phase of the investigation" and that the data reveals "serious underselling."
Regarding the price effects finding, the petitioners proposed four pricing products used by the ITC in the preliminary investigations. The commission saw that quarterly pricing data for these products oversold the domestic like product in "just over half of the available comparisons." At this stage, the petitioners endorsed these pricing products as being "representative" and "adequate to convey [the relative pricing of subject imports and the domestic product]," the respondents said.
In the final investigations, the ITC said subject imports oversold the domestic like product in 60.9% of available quarterly comparisons, finding that this data showed a "lack of significant underselling." After initially endorsing the commission's pricing products, the petitioners now "attack the results generated from the pricing data" and "invite the Court to reweigh ten data points duly considered by the Commission."
The respondents argued that the "Court should refuse that invitation."
In attacking the quarterly price comparison data, the petitioners advanced four reasons for why the ITC should have bucked its "established practice of relying on quarterly price comparison data and confirmed reports of lost sales for assessing relative prices in the U.S. market." The four reasons are that the coverage of the data was low, the ITC didn't include pricing data from the preliminary investigations, the commission included a revision that was improperly submitted, and the ITC was "impacted by flawed pricing product reporting."
The respondents said all four reasons are "misguided," again emphasizing that the petitioners initially "endorsed the re-use of pricing products from the preliminary investigations." Regarding the claim that responses from importers submitted in the preliminary phase weren't used in the final phase, the ITC reasonably explained this move, which was made, since the "instructions for reporting import pricing values for ex-works sales had changed from the preliminary to final-phase questionnaires," the respondents said.
And while the petitioners said they demonstrated before the ITC that "certain firms inaccurately reported pricing data for downstream articles and products sold at a different level of trade" and that "inaccuracies remained [unresolved]," the respondents said this isn't true. The petitioners' "demonstrations" were "mere factual assertions," and, in any case, "whether to accept questionnaire responses (or amendments thereto) is a question of credibility squarely within the Commission’s discretion," the brief said.
The petitioners listed 10 factors before the court they say cut against a finding of no significant underselling. In response, the respondents said a "closer look at these factors" highlights the "relative weakness of any evidence supporting Plaintiffs’ preferred interpretation of the underselling record."
Four of the factors relate to lost sales and revenue reporting, which the ITC said weighted against a significant underselling finding, while two are "unremarkably present in virtually every Commission investigation." And one factor is a "request to recycle data from the 45-day preliminary phase." For the last four, the ITC "reasonably explained why it found the 'apples-to-apples' comparisons from the pricing data, corroborated by purchaser reporting on lost sales, to be more probative than [average unit value] data, general narrative purchaser impressions, a self-interested purchase-cost analysis, and a handful of largely flawed communications," the brief said.
Regarding the ITC's finding of no adverse impact, the respondents said the petitioner's challenges "are largely derivative of their challenge to the Commission’s underselling analysis in that they claim that underselling -- not their own supply constraints -- was responsible for any declines in the domestic industry’s performance."
Similar to their arguments regarding the relative price of subject imports and domestically made extrusions, these claims "largely ignore the analysis the Commission actually conducted" and focus instead on "general reporting rather than specific reports of domestic supply constraints from the purchasers that were actually the focal point of the domestic industry’s market share loss," the brief said.