US Defends Commerce's Use of Both Inter- and Same-Quarter Analyses in Review
Against opposition from exporters (see 2411190063), the U.S. supported Nov. 21 the Commerce Department’s continued decision on remand to use an inter-quarter comparison for an aspect of an administrative review and same-quarter comparisons for another (see 2409240022) (Universal Tube and Plastic Industries v. U.S., CIT # 23-00113).
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Following a defendant-intervenor producer’s comments Nov. 20 (see 2411190063), the U.S. also said that Commerce was right to use the two different comparison methods in its review of the antidumping duty orders on welded carbon-quality steel from the United Arab Emirates. Court of International Trade Judge Jennifer Choe-Groves remanded the results for explanation or alteration, finding them inconsistent.
Like producer Wheatland Tube Company, the government said that Commerce used same-quarter comparisons when calculating antidumping margins and an inter-quarter comparison for the Cohen’s d test because the exporters being reviewed experienced significant fluctuations of production costs during the relevant time period. Those fluctuations could have impacted the AD margin if not accounted for; but the Cohen’s d test only looks to U.S. prices, it said.
“Comparing U.S. prices across quarters is not distortive in identifying a pattern of prices that differ significantly among time periods, but rather is the entire purpose of that analysis,” it said.
It also claimed that the exporters, led by Universal Tube and Plastic Industries, hadn’t engaged with the “detailed” explanation of this by Commerce in their comments on the remand results.
“Universal mischaracterizes Commerce’s reasoning as an argument that Commerce ‘is permitted to adopt inconsistent approaches because it does not need to understand or recognize the reasons for any price differences,’” it said.
It agreed Commerce doesn’t have to figure out why prices may have differed. But the department “is tasked with identifying” such price patterns “to determine if there is a risk of targeted dumping that warrants further scrutiny,” which is what it did here, it said.
And Universal also didn’t challenge Commerce’s explanation of the different contexts in which the two comparison methods were used, only saying that the department’s “‘reliance on different contexts’ was misplaced,” it said. It said the exporter was misinterpreting several of Commerce’s statements and misunderstanding the purpose of quarterly analyses.