Chinese Wood Flooring Exporter Takes Issue With Commerce's Surrogate Data in AD Review

The Commerce Department erred by selecting Brazil as the primary surrogate country in an antidumping duty review then using log input data from Malaysia, exporter Jiangsu Senmao Bamboo and Wood Industry Co. said in a July 7 complaint at the Court of International Trade. Senmao also contested Commerce's decision to deny the exporter a byproduct offset, revise the Brazilian surrogate value data for plywood and select Brazil as the primary surrogate while rejecting its log data, adjusting the plywood data and revising the financial ratios (Jiangsu Senmoa Bamboo and Wood Industry Co. v. United States, CIT #22-00190).

The case challenges the 2019-2020 administrative review of the AD order on multilatered wood flooring from China in which Senmao served as a mandatory respondent. In the review, Commerce tapped Brazil over Malaysia as the primary surrogate country, but chose to value Senmao's log inputs using Malaysian surrogate data. The respondent said this deviated from the agency's past practice to value all factors of production from a single surrogate data unless the data is unavailable or unreliable.

Commerce also declined to grant Senmao a byproduct offset -- a move the respondent says is contrary to its consistent decisions in past reviews to grant the byproduct offset with no new facts justifying the new treatment. Commerce also erred in how it calculated the Brazilian financial ratios and in its move to select Brazil while making adjustments to or ignoring certain of its data. "If the Department cannot value logs and plywood using the unadjusted Brazilian data then the Department’s conclusion that Brazil provides the best factors data is not reasonable and the Department should have relied on Malaysia as the primary surrogate country," the complaint said.