Commerce Should Have Used Different Surrogate in Review, Steel Shelves Producer Says

A domestic producer of boltless steel shelving units brought a complaint to the Court of International Trade on July 11 arguing that the Commerce Department had wrongly refused to use the surrogate it suggested in an antidumping duty investigation (Edsal Manufacturing Co. v. U.S., CIT # 24-00108).

Producer Edsal Manufacturing said the department abused its discretion by refusing to use the surrogate sales data of Thai exporter Sahamitr Pressure Container in its review of an antidumping duty order on boltless steel shelves from Thailand. Instead, Commerce relied solely on another company, PNS.

Unlike PNS, Sahamitr “exclusively produces comparable merchandise,” i.e., steel cylinders, it said. In contrast, PNS “produces a wide variety of non-comparable merchandise,” it said.

It also argued that “Commerce has a longstanding practice of relying on financial statements that show evidence of the receipt of subsidies,” but that it didn’t do so in this case. Any subsidies Sahamitr received were “negligible,” so they couldn’t have had a “distortive impact on the CV profit or selling expense ratios,” it said.

And it called out two deficiencies it alleged in PNS’s financial statement: First, that it included a lot of non-comparable merchandise, and, second, that it wasn’t detailed enough “to reasonably breakdown selling and administrative expenses for indirect selling expenses,” it said. Sahamitr’s statements didn’t have those problems, it said.

The producer also said Commerce ignored the possibility one of the review’s respondents may have misreported the dates of its U.S. sales.