Commerce More Doubles Dumping Margin Calculation for Cambodian Mattress Makers on Remand

The Commerce Department is set to increase the antidumping duty rate it assigned to Best Mattresses and Rose Lion in an AD investigation on mattresses from Cambodia, it said in a remand redetermination dated July 17. Commerce reopened the record and issued a supplemental questionnaire to the petitioners, asking for further explanation of the process by which they retrieved Emirates Sleep’s financial statements and how the statements constituted publicly available information (Best Mattresses International v. U.S., CIT # 21-00281).

On remand, Commerce concluded that Cambodia continued to be the appropriate “market under consideration" and that the continued use of Cambodian Trademap data, excluding data from non-market economy countries and countries with export subsidies, was still warranted. Commerce also found that while audited financial statements from Emirates Sleep were publicly available, an average of those statements and others from Grand Twins International was the best proxy of constructed value profit on the record. Commerce readjusted the weighted-average dumping margin for Best Mattresses and Rose Lion to 103.79%, from 45.34%.

In the remand order (see 2302270076), the court had rejected Commerce’s determination of the market price using Trademap data because it required an unreasonable interpretation of “market under consideration” to mean only the country under investigation. On remand, Commerce argued that "the goal of the transactions disregarded analysis is to arrive at a market price for the inputs which would be available to the respondents ... ."

Commerce said that it used the information available on the record that best approximated the market price that the respondents would pay for the inputs it used to produce mattresses in Cambodia. The market under consideration is Cambodia because, "if the respondents were not sourcing the inputs from their affiliated suppliers, they would, instead, be paying the market price for such inputs in Cambodia," Commerce said.

Commerce reconsidered its decision on the use of surrogate financial statements. Although the court found that Emirates Sleep’s business operations were "sufficiently similar to those of Best Mattresses," Commerce found on remand that it could not determine whether the “balance with government authorities” constituted a government subsidy and so it couldn't conclude that Emirates Sleep’s financial statements are complete. In the underlying investigation, financial statements from apparel and garment producer GTI were found to represent profit information for production and sales in the preferred foreign country but of merchandise that was not comparable. On remand and because of the alleged incompleteness of Emirates Sleep's financial statements, Commerce chose to use an average of Emirates Sleep and GTI’s constructed value profit and selling expense ratios for Best Mattresses/Rose Lion’s profit and selling expenses.

The court had remanded Commerce’s use of Cambodian Trademap data under the Transactions Disregarded Rule, its inclusion of imports from a non-market economy and export-subsidizing countries, and its conclusions that the financial statements of Emirates Sleep were complete and publicly available in a February order.