Constructed Input Shipping Costs Are Calculated Per-Kilogram and Per-Kilometer, Exporter Says

A Chinese exporter of passenger vehicle and light truck tires said in a May 14 complaint that the Commerce Department repeatedly made a mathematical error in an antidumping duty review by constructing input freight shipment cost without considering distance (Giti Tire Global Trading PTE. LTD. v. U.S., CIT # 24-00083).

The department’s common practice is to calculate surrogate input shipping costs on a per-kilogram and per-kilometer basis, exporter Giti Tire said. However in the recent review, Commerce only calculated the surrogate costs for Giti per-kilogram, it said.

Giti said it filed both case briefs and ministerial corrections during the review to get Commerce to correct the error. Each time, the department countered that to also calculate Giti’s input shipment costs per-kilometer would distort the data.

In its response to Giti’s ministerial correction, however, it admitted a mathematic error but appeared to misunderstand Giti’s allegation, saying that “there should be no distance component included in the calculation of the boat freight and we find our inclusion of distance in the calculation is an error in arithmetic function." The exporter claims Commerce never included distance in that calculation to begin with.

Giti also said in the complaint that Commerce wrongly ordered all of the exporter’s entries “not reported in the U.S. [sales] data submitted by Giti” to be liquidated by CBP at the China-wide rate. This was despite the fact that the department initially ordered Giti to report constructed export price sales made after importation using dates of sale, not dates of entry, the exporter said.

Because Giti makes a number of transactions out of its own U.S. distribution centers, some of its entries made during the period of review had not yet been sold by the period’s end, it said, and thus didn't show up in that sales data. But, it said, there was “no basis” for liquidating those entries at the China-wide rate instead.