CIT Issues Third Remand of 2007 China Wooden Bedroom Furniture AD Review

The Court of International Trade remanded for a third time the International Trade Administration’s adverse facts available (AFA) rate for Orient¹ in the 2007 administrative review of the antidumping duty order on wooden bedroom furniture from China (A-570-890). The ITA brought the rate down to 130.81% in its second remand redetermination (from 216.01% in the final results and first remand redetermination), but CIT said the rate is still not within the bounds of commercial reality. CIT also sustained the ITA’s use of another data set to determine the surrogate value for wood inputs.

While the ITA selected a lower AFA AD rate for non-cooperative respondent Orient, the ITA “cherry-picked and manipulated” the data, CIT said. Specifically, it arrived at the new AD rate by selecting product category-specific AD margins for Yihua Timber’s sales of the same product types sold by Orient, selected the highest specific AD margin of each of Yihua Timber’s products, and then averaged those margins together. The ITA cannot select a rate that has been artificially constructed just to punish a non-cooperative respondent, CIT said. “By selecting a very small number of the highest product-specific margins from a different respondent, Commerce appears to have done just that,” it said. Thus, Orient’s recalculated rate does not meet the threshold of a rational relationship between the AFA rate chosen and the commercial reality of the non-cooperating respondent, said CIT.

(Lifestyle Enter., Inc v. United States, CIT Slip Op. 12-116, dated 09/07/12, Judge Restani)

(Attorneys: Jill Cramer of Mowry & Grimson for plaintiffs Lifestyle Enterprise Inc. et al.; William Perry of Garvey Schubert Barer for consolidated plaintiff Dream Rooms Furniture; John Greenwald of Cassidy Levy Kent for consolidated plaintiff Yihua Timber; Nancy Noonan for intervenor plaintiff Orient; Stuart Delery for defendant U.S.; J. Michael Taylor of King & Spalding for intervenor defendants American Furniture Manufacturers Committee for Legal Trade, et al.)

(See ITT’s Online Archives 11021816 and 12040508 for summaries of the first and second remands of the final results of the 2007 administrative review of wooden bedroom furniture, respectively.)

¹Orient International Holding Shanghai Foreign Trade Co., Ltd.