Commerce Rate Calculations in Quartz Countertop Case Face Challenges From All Sides

The Commerce department’s decision to use the all-others rate from an earlier antidumping duty investigation on quartz surface products to calculate the rate for the non-selected respondents in the first administrative review should be remanded to the agency, AD petitioner Cambria said in a June 30 motion at the Court of International Trade (Cambria Co. v. United States, CIT # 23-00007).

In the 2019-21 administrative review on quartz surface products from India, Commerce chose Pokarna Engineered Stone and Antique Marbonite Private as the two mandatory respondents. In the review's preliminary results, Commerce assigned a zero percent margin for Pokarna, a 323.12% AFA-based rate for Marbonite, and a 161.56% margin for the non-individually reviewed respondents. Commerce changed the rate to 3.19% in the final review for Pokarna, using the all-others rate from the original investigation (see 2302100067).

When Commerce chose to depart from the expected method, a simple average of Pokarna's and Antique's dumping marines, the burden of proof lay with the department to show that the dumping margins of the mandatory respondents did not reflect the dumping margins of the non-selected companies, Cambria said. Historical rates cited by Commerce to justify the departure can't, by themselves, warrant a departure from the expected method, Cambria said.

Commerce failed to consider that the history of the order was so short, that the rates fluctuated significantly across the AD proceeding, and that none of the historical rates pertained to the non-selected companies in the current review, all of which negated their probative value, Cambria argued. Finally, Cambria said that the average unit values of the non-selected respondents meant that the averaged rate did reasonably reflect their dumping.

Importers Arizona Tile, MS International and PNS Clearance asked the court in a separate motion for judgment to remand the results to Commerce, with instructions to recalculate Antique’s AD margin. The importers argued that because Antique had filed its response to Commerce’s second supplemental questionnaire only five hours late and made multiple attempts to correct the record, the final rate AFA was unduly punitive.

In their own motion for judgment, respondents Antique Marbonite, Prism Johnson and Shivam contested Commerce's use of total AFA for Marbonite and said its decisions to reject the Antique Group’s second supplemental response and to deny its requests to refile the response were arbitrary and an abuse of discretion. The three plaintiffs argued that Commerce failed to show that Antique did not cooperate to the best of its ability and that the rejection of the filing resulted in the "unnecessarily punitive" 323.12% rate.