AD Petitioner Challenges Various Surrogate Value Picks in AD Review on Mobile Access Equipment
Antidumping petitioner Coalition of American Manufacturers of Mobile Access Equipment took to the Court of International Trade on Jan. 3 to challenge the Commerce Department's surrogate value picks in the 2022-23 review of the antidumping duty order on mobile access equipment from China. The petitioner filed a 12-count complaint to contest 12 different surrogate data picks (Coalition of American Manufacturers of Mobile Access Equipment v. United States, CIT # 24-00219).
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The agency picked exporter Zhejiang Dingli Machinery Co. to serve as the sole mandatory respondent in the review, soliciting information on its factors of production and surrogate value data to be used to value those factors of production. Dingli ultimately received a 12.39% AD rate in the review.
Administratively, and now before CIT, the coalition said Commerce improperly valued the various inputs by "collapsing distinct inputs under a single variable, ignored and refused to consider record evidence that the surrogate value data provided by the Coalition are more specific to the inputs in question than those submitted by Dingli." The petitioner added that the agency failed to fully examine the data on the record.
In all, the coalition challenged Commerce's surrogate value picks for "motor controllers, hot-rolled and cold-rolled steel tubes, rectangular steel tubes, brakes, steel forearms, wheels, paint powder, circuit breakers, steel plates with a thickness of between 3.00 and 4.75 mm, steel plates with a thickness greater than 10 mm, and other inputs, including gear pumps, GPS modules, hydraulic filters, indicator lights, lithium batteries, various plastic materials, roller brackets, and cold-rolled plate with a thickness less than 3 mm."
In addition, the petitioner said Commerce erred in its surrogate value data pick for Dingli's ocean freight costs. Initially, Commerce used Descartes data submitted by the coalition, but the agency reversed course in its final determination and chose to use Dingli's Descartes, Drewry and Freightos data. The coalition said its data "satisfied all of the agency’s established surrogate value criteria," while Dingli's submitted data did not.