Trade Group Challenges 2022-23 AD Review of Korean Wind Towers
In a Nov. 11 motion for judgment, a wind tower petitioner said that the Commerce Department’s administrative review of the antidumping duty order on South Korean utility-scale wind towers wrongly failed to adjust a respondent’s conversion costs and erred in constructing the respondent’s value using, in part, information dating back to when that respondent wasn’t profitable (Wind Tower Trade Coalition v. United States, CIT # 25-00104).
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Commerce should have taken into account the fact that mandatory respondent Dongkuk’s different wind tower models differed in price for reasons other than their physical characteristics, Wind Tower Trade Coalition said.
Dongkuk itself acknowledged this, the petitioner said; the exporter explained in the administrative review that it “allocates conversion costs according to monthly production quantities on a project-specific basis,” and project production volumes aren’t related to wind tower models’ physical characteristics.
Wind Tower Trade Coalition itself also provided Commerce an analysis of Dongkuk’s pricing that bore out the same conclusion, it said. That analysis determined that per-section conversion costs weren’t related to a number of physical characteristics, including height and weight.
Commerce’s refusal to adjust Dongkuk’s conversion costs for this reason was based on several errors and false assumptions, the petitioner said.
For one, it said, the department ignored any comparisons between models based on type, height or weight, turning instead to the “fourth most influential physical characteristic,” the number of sections in a given wind tower model. Based on that, Commerce determined that conversion costs didn’t vary significantly across wind tower models with the same number of sections.
Commerce was also wrong on that point, it said, as the department’s analysis actually showed that Dongkuk produced different volumes of models with the same number of sections.
Further, the department “illogically” counted steel plates, direct materials, within Dongkuk’s conversion costs, the coalition said. And it only analyzed certain models.
Wind Tower Trade Coalition also attacked Commerce’s decision to construct a value for Dongkuk partly using the company’s 2022 finances. But this was a year that, as a whole, the company wasn’t profitable, it said.
Commerce acknowledged that, but justified its selection based on the fact that at least one section of the exporter related to wind tower production had achieved profitability in 2022, the coalition said. In a heavily redacted section of the brief, it opposed that justification, calling it unsupported by the evidence.