List 4A Tariff Exclusion Requests Close With Final-Day Inundation of 2,800 Filed

U.S. importers of Chinese goods inundated the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative with more than 2,800 List 4A tariff-exclusion requests in the 24 hours before the web portal went dark at 11:59 p.m. EST Jan. 31, the public docket shows. The surge came amid the huge backlog of List 3 requests still awaiting disposition. The requests filed Jan. 31 were nearly a third of the 8,800 requests posted in the three months after the portal went live on Halloween Day. Importers that are granted exclusions would qualify for refunds of the 15 percent duties paid on goods entering the country, retroactive to Sept. 1, 2019, when the tariffs took effect. The List 4A tariffs are scheduled for a Feb. 14 rollback to 7.5 percent when the U.S.-China phase one trade deal goes into force.

Several tech companies filed single applications for List 4A exemptions, but waited until the final day to do so. They include Intel, which said it’s “not aware of any large scale domestic manufacturing” in the U.S. of the solid-state drives (SSDs) it sources from China under the 8523.51.00.00 subheading. “This product is currently not available from sources in third countries.”

Lyft can’t find U.S. sourcing for the “custom lithium-ion battery packs” at the scale it “requires for its e-bikes,” it said. It imports them from China under the 8507.60.00.20 tariff code. “The U.S. suppliers that Lyft has surveyed are only able to offer battery packs at lower volumes.”

Robotic lawn mowers “are a new product for iRobot, which plans to launch its first model” this year, the vendor said. “There are only a handful of facilities globally that produce these goods, mainly in China,” sourced under the 8433.11.00.10 for electric lawn mowers, it said. IRobot ran a U.S. “beta trial” in the fall of a robotic lawn mower called Terra, CEO Colin Angle said on a Q3 earnings call in October. It plans a modest 2020 rollout, with “larger-scale commercial launches” in spring 2021, he said then.

Applicants in the three-month List 4A proceeding sought exclusions 128 times for goods imported under the 8517.62.00.90 subheading, more than for any other consumer tech category, the docket shows. That’s likely because 8517.62.00.90 covers a wide swath of tech goods, including smart speakers, Bluetooth headphones, smartwatches and fitness trackers. Speaker vendors filed 52 exclusion requests for 8518.22.00.00 goods.

All exclusion requests proceed automatically to a “Stage 2" hold once their 14-day public comment periods expire. No requests submitted in List 4A are above Stage 2, including those filed opening day, the docket shows. Successful applications ultimately progress to Stage 4, when the requests are granted and scheduled for publication in the Federal Register.

Obvious backlogs abound in the List 3 exclusions process that closed more than four months ago and drew 30,000-plus requests, that docket shows. USTR granted 526 requests in seven tranches between Aug. 7 and Jan. 31. It denied about 12,200 and advanced a few hundred more to Stage 3. More than 17,000 applications remain at Stage 2, including some that have been held there since early summer. USTR didn’t comment.stag