Two Indian makers of the same stainless steel flange come out of the same review at 0.60 percent and 50.72 percent, and the larger number was not calculated from that company's own sales

Just over fifty percentage points separate the two companies Commerce actually examined.

Chandan Steel Limited leaves the 2023 to 2024 review of stainless steel flanges from India with a weighted average dumping margin of 0.60 percent, a rate Commerce treated as neither zero nor de minimis, since it went on to hand the same figure to everybody else. The collapsed group of BFN Forgings, Flanschen werk Bebitz, Viraj Alloys, Viraj Forgings, Viraj Impoexpo and Viraj Profiles leaves it at 50.72 percent. Both make the same product and both sold it into the same market in the same twelve months.

The difference is not a finding about either company's prices. Commerce assigned the BFN and Viraj rate entirely on facts otherwise available with adverse inferences, under sections 776(a) and (b) of the Tariff Act, which is the mechanism that applies when the record does not yield a usable calculation. Whether that was justified is argued out in the Issues and Decision Memorandum, filed on the department's electronic docket and listed in this notice as the second of two issues raised. This brief has not read it, and says so rather than guessing at reasoning it has not seen.

The rate everyone else gets

Nine other Indian producers were named in the review and none was individually examined. They all take Chandan's 0.60 percent, and the statute is the reason. Section 735(c)(5) tells Commerce to average the individually calculated margins while throwing out anything zero, de minimis, or based entirely on facts available. Discard the 50.72 percent on that rule and one number is left standing. So the whole non-examined tier of this order is now priced off a single respondent's calculation.

The original 2018 investigation set an all-others rate of 7.00 percent, later amended, and that figure has not gone away. It still governs a specific case: entries Chandan produced and sold to a reseller or trading company without knowing the goods were bound for the United States liquidate at 7.00 percent where the intermediary has no rate of its own.

Nearly two years after the fact

The period under review closed on 30 September 2024. The final results were signed on 17 August 2026, and the trail of extensions in the notice explains where the time went. Deadlines were tolled by 90 days in December 2024, by 47 days in November 2025 for the lapse in appropriations, by a further 21 days later that month to clear the backlog of filings that had piled up in the department's electronic system during the shutdown, and then extended three separate times between May and August of this year.

Two of the thirteen companies originally under review, Echjay Forgings and Goodluck India, withdrew their requests in February 2025 and were dropped. Everybody else waited.

Commerce made no changes at all between the preliminary results in February and these final ones. The case briefs were filed, the two issues were argued, and every number came out where it went in.