Commerce Used Wrong Surrogate Input Data in Chinese Brake Drum AD Investigation, Exporter Argues
Challenging an affirmative antidumping duty determination regarding Chinese brake drums, an importer and exporter said Oct. 10 that the Commerce Department failed to properly value the sole mandatory respondent’s inland freight costs and scrap recycling process (Consolidated Metco v. United States, CIT # 25-00208).
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Mandatory respondent Shandong ConMet Mechanical Co., which joined importer Consolidated Metco in filing the complaint, said that Commerce shouldn’t have used Turkish data to construct the exporter’s inland freight costs. The data it used, the World Bank’s “Doing Business -- Turkey” report, wasn’t contemporaneous with the investigation and wasn’t specific to truck freight, the plaintiffs said.
That led to “unreasonably high values” that were “many times higher” than other, more suitable alternatives, they said.
Further, Commerce inaccurately applied a lira-based inflator to the Turkish surrogate data after it had already converted that data to U.S. dollars, they said. They argued the department should have used the inflator on the data first, then converted it to dollars.
The importer and exporter also challenged Commerce’s decision to classify Shandong’s scrap cast iron as a byproduct instead of as an input. Usually, they said, the department will treat scrap as direct materials if they are reintroduced during processing and as byproducts if they are sold to third parties. Its failure to do so in this instance impacted Shandong’s production costs calculation, they said.