Commerce has opened dumping cases on stainless pipe from India, Türkiye and the UAE, and an order it wrote ten years ago now blocks it from picking Indian respondents the usual way
Three countries, one product, and margins the petitioners put as high as 187.33 percent.
Commerce initiated antidumping investigations on 4 August into welded stainless line and pressure pipe from India, Türkiye and the United Arab Emirates, and countervailing duty investigations into India and Türkiye alongside them. The petitions came in on 15 July from Bristol Pipe and Tube, Felker Brothers and Primus Pipe and Tube, three domestic producers.
The alleged dumping margins on which Commerce initiated are 89.74 to 187.33 percent for India, 19.54 to 127.36 percent for Türkiye, and 57.04 to 113.19 percent for the UAE. None of that is a finding. It is what the petitioners calculated and what Commerce accepted as sufficient to open a file.
The interesting problem is India, and it is one Commerce made itself
There is already an antidumping and countervailing duty order on welded stainless pressure pipe from India, issued in November 2016. Products covered by it are carved out of this scope. On paper that is tidy.
In practice the tariff lines do not separate. Commerce normally picks which companies to investigate by pulling Customs and Border Protection entry data for the subheadings named in the scope and taking the largest importers. Here it says it cannot, because the subheadings in this scope overlap with the ones covered by the 2016 order, so the entry data cannot tell the two products apart.
So it is falling back to quantity and value questionnaires, and because the petitions named 16 Indian producers and exporters it is limiting who gets one, using the customs data as a rough filter and requiring a complete address on the record. Any Indian producer that does not receive a questionnaire may download it and respond anyway. Responses are due at 5 p.m. Eastern on 18 August.
How the prices were built
Worth reading, because two of the three countries rest on a constructed figure rather than an observed one.
For India the petitioners derived export price from month and port specific average unit values in official import statistics, tied to ship manifest data. For Türkiye and the UAE they used period average unit values from the same statistics. On the other side of the comparison, for India and the UAE they obtained home market prices and then found those prices sat below the cost of production, so normal value was rebuilt from constructed value. For Türkiye they could obtain neither home market nor third country prices at all, and went straight to constructed value.
Dates
Scope comments close at 5 p.m. Eastern on 24 August, rebuttals on 3 September. The International Trade Commission has 45 days from the 15 July filing to decide whether there is a reasonable indication of injury, which puts that vote on 29 August, and a negative vote on any country ends the case for that country. Commerce has 140 days from initiation for its own preliminary determinations unless it postpones them, which works out at 22 December.
The scope covers circular welded austenitic stainless line and pressure pipe of any diameter, including material meeting the ASTM A-312, A-358, A-409 and A-778 specifications and API 5LC. Mechanical tubing, boiler and heat exchanger tubing, specialised tubing and anything with a wall thinner than 1.65 mm are excluded.
