Exporter Asks for Direct Order on Surrogate Values for Plywood Inputs at CIT

Exporter Jiangsu Senmao Bamboo and Wood Industry Co. asked the Court of International Trade to compel the Commerce Department not to make adjustments to the plywood surrogate value in the 2019-20 administrative review of the antidumping duty order on multilayered wood flooring from China. The exporter said in an Aug. 20 brief that, after two remands, the court "has been patient with Commerce," but the agency "has now demonstrated that it has no reasonable explanation for its methodology yet sticks to its unsupported position" (Jiangsu Senmao Bamboo and Wood Industry Co. v. United States, CIT Consol. # 22-00190).

As a result, "a direct order to Commerce is appropriate," the brief said.

In the review, the agency picked Brazil as the main surrogate nation while rejecting or adjusting Brazilian data for the flooring's primary inputs. Senmao said this isn't in line with the court's previous orders. Commerce claimed that the Brazilian values "were publicly available, contemporaneous with the period of review, representative of a broad market average, tax and duty-exclusive, and specific to the inputs being valued."

Senmao said this conclusion is at odds with Commerce's decisions in this case and against the record, which can't show that the Brazilian log data was specific to Senmao's inputs. Instead, Commerce used Malaysian data to value oak logs and adjusted the data to remove import data from Spain, resulting in a "distorted" value for plywood when using Brazilian data, the company said.

As a result, "the only country that meets the criteria to value Senmao’s inputs is Malaysia," the brief said. If Commerce can't use Brazilian data without adjusting it and can't find a Brazilian surrogate to value oak logs, then it should have picked "Malaysia as the primary surrogate country and relied on Malaysian data for all of the surrogate values," the company argued.

Commerce's claim that it needed to "manipulate Brazilian data undermines its choice of Brazil as the surrogate country for this review," the brief said. "The Commerce selection of Brazil as the primary surrogate country because it supposedly provided the best information available for valuing Senmao’s factors of production is inconsistent with the Department’s finding that there are significant flaws in the Brazilian data, including with respect to the major inputs."