CIT Again Remands 2009-10 China Wooden Bedroom Furniture AD Review; Orders Reversal
The Court of International Trade again rejected the 2009-10 antidumping duty administrative review on wooden bedroom furniture from China (A-570-890), finding the Commerce Department failed to comply with two aspects of a September 2012 remand order. While accepting some of Commerce’s explanations and reconsiderations, the court again found fault with the agency’s decision to rely on calculated surrogate values of Huafeng’s inputs instead of the actual market prices paid, as well as its continued reliance on a questionable financial statement. Rather than remand for reconsideration, this time the court ordered that Commerce reverse its positions.
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U.S. importer Home Meridian International disputed the Commerce Department’s decision to use “surrogate values” calculated from unrelated price data to judge the market value of respondent Huafeng’s wood inputs. In so doing, the agency disregarded the actual price paid by Huafeng to market economy producers for the inputs. Commerce’s justification was that the purchases from market economy companies had occurred before the period of review. The agency’s policy is that the purchases must be contemporaneous, it said. And in any case, Huafeng’s assertion that all of the wood inputs used to produce exports of subject merchandise during the period of review were purchased from market economies was questionable, Commerce said.
While the court declined to reject Commerce’s input valuation methodology wholesale, it did in this case find that the agency’s decision with respect to Huafeng’s inputs was unreasonable. Commerce can easily adjust non-contemporaneous prices for inflation, it said, especially given the questions that surrounded the price data used to construct the surrogates. And while the evidence Huafeng provided on how much it used market economy inputs was imperfect, Commerce decided to rely on nonexistent evidence when it disagreed with Huafeng’s characterization of its inputs as entirely sourced from market economies. The court ordered Commerce to recalculate Huafeng’s AD rate using the market economy input prices.
(Home Meridian Int'l, Inc. v. United States, Slip Op. 13-81, dated 06/25/13, Judge Restani)