AD Investigation on OCTG Ffrom Argentina Had Plenty of Industry Support, US Says

The Commerce Department on June 26 called an importer’s claim that it could have double-counted industry support for an antidumping investigation “misplaced,” saying that double-counting wasn’t possible normally under the department's calculation method and that there was no evidence U.S. producers had “literally counted each ton of pipe they produced twice” (Tenaris Bay City v. U.S., CIT # 22-00343).

In response to a remand order, the department reaffirmed that it believed an AD investigation on oil country tubular goods from Argentina was lawfully begun and hadn’t double-counted industry support.

The Court of International Trade remanded part of the department’s decision to initiate the investigation in March (see 2403220033). CIT Judge Claire Kelly said that it hadn’t proven an investigation petition carried the support of at least 50% of the domestic industry. Some producers both produce and finish OCTGs and may have accidentally been counted twice, she said.

On remand, the department said it had not found any evidence of double-counting.

Even though importer and producer Tenaris USA opposed the antidumping investigation, Commerce had proceeded initially because it had the requisite industry support “even under the more conservative industry support calculations on the record, including the alternative methodology proposed by Tenaris,” it said.

It also noted that Tenaris had filed four submissions regarding industry support before Commerce began the investigation, and it hadn’t mentioned double-counting in any of them.

Instead, the importer used those briefs to raise concerns about the possibility petitioners’ calculations “might include data that pertain to ‘mere finishing operations,’” asking the department to exclude OCTG that is solely finished from its data. It also alleged two petitioning companies were much more heavily focused on OCTG finishing than production, and, in support, provided Commerce “printouts of each company’s website, containing basic ‘who we are’ summary information,” Commerce said.

Further, “[i]n three of these four pre-initiation submissions, Tenaris USA claimed to be the largest U.S. producer of OCTG, but failed to provide any information (e.g., production data) to substantiate its assertion,” it said.

The department said that, to comply with the remand order, it had reexamined the record to analyze whether companies who primarily engaged in finishing activities should have been included as members of the domestic OCTG industry.

The International Trade Commission, it noted, uses its own six-factor framework to determine what firms are producers of domestic like product after an investigation is launched. In 2014, the ITC used that framework for an analysis of the OCTG industry and “concluded that processors of green tube that provide heat treatment engage in sufficient production-related activities to be considered domestic producers of OCTG,” it said.

From then on, the ITC “consistently included processors of green tube that provide heat treatment as part of the domestic industry,” it said.

Therefore, the department said that it saw “no reason” to depart from that definition in its own investigation.

As for Tenaris USA’s concerns about double-counting, Commerce called them “misplaced.” The department’s usual methodological approach “fairly accounts for total U.S. production,” and so it said “it is unclear how this allegation impugns the industry support calculation or skews the calculation in such a way that would overstate the supporters’ share of total U.S. production.”

Their usual calculation was an apples-to-apples comparison that included OCTG finishing and production in both the numerator and denominator, so there was no reason for double-counting to have occurred.

For instance, there was no evidence that “any of the U.S. producers who provided actual production data on the record literally counted each ton of pipe they produced twice -- once upon the pipe formation and again upon heat treatment, threading, etc.,” it said.

“Likewise, just because a U.S. producer has processing capabilities does not mean that it reported the heat treatment processing it performed on another U.S. company’s already reported, domestically-produced green tube, thereby duplicating the reported quantity of the green tube and the finished OCTG product,” it said.