Commerce Adds Service Revenues in AD Respondent's US Price Calculation on Remand at CIT

The Commerce Department added certain service-related revenues in antidumping duty respondent Nippon Steel's U.S. price in voluntarily requested remand results, dropping the exporter's dumping margin from 11.70% to 10.12%. Agreeing it "inadvertently" left three service-related expenses out of its calculations of Nippon Steel's U.S. price, Commerce requested the voluntary remand, including them in the price calculations. Nippon Steel still took issue with Commerce's draft revision, prompting the agency to make further revisions to the calculation of the net price used in the differential pricing test and the revenue for the constructed export price (CEP) profit rate (Nippon Steel v. U.S., CIT #21-00533).

The case concerns the third administrative review of the antidumping duty order on hot-rolled steel flat products from Japan. In the review, Commerce originally said it relied on Nippon Steel's total reported revenue in the company's Section C sales database when finding its U.S. price. After Nippon Steel took it to the trade court, the agency then said it relied on only a subset of these revenues and that three service-related revenues -- embossing revenue, slitting revenue and cutting to length revenue -- were left out. The remand request was then submitted and granted.

In the Aug. 1 remand results, Commerce included these service revenues in the calculation of Nippon Steel's U.S. price. In comments on the draft remand results, Nippon Steel argued these revisions didn't go far enough and said Commerce should also make revisions to the calculation of the net price used in the differential pricing test and the revenue for the CEP profit rate. In the alternative, Commerce could modify the calculation of the adjusted U.S. gross unit price by adding the service revenues to the U.S. gross unit price instead of adding them to the U.S. net price calculation.

Commerce agreed, making the adjustments identified by the respondent. "[W]e agree with Nippon Steel that, in addition to adding these service-related revenue to U.S. net price in the dumping margin program, the Macros program also needs to account for these adjustments," the remand results said. "Therefore, we added these three service-related revenues to the net price used in performing the differential pricing test and in computing the revenue for CEP profit rate."