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Trade and Industry Department The Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region
Brand Hong Kong - Asia world city
MY COLOUR

Commercial Information Circulars

24-hour hotline : 23 922 922

e-mail address : enquiry@tid.gov.hk

Ref : EIC 111/3/10/1

 3 January 2005

Dear Sirs,

Commercial Information Circular No. 2/2005

US : Separate-Rates Practice in Antidumping Proceedings involving
Non-Market Economy Countries

As highlighted in our Commercial Information Circular (CIC) No. 234/2004 of 24 September 2004, the US Department of Commerce (DOC) is considering changes to anti-dumping (AD) proceedings involving non-market economy countries (NMEs). After a three-month consultation period, the DOC published a notice in the Federal Register (FR) on 28 December 2004 announcing that it has provisionally decided to adopt an application process for evaluating separate rate requests by non-investigated firms, and to consider instituting combination rates for all firms receiving a separate rate in NME cases. Interested parties are invited to submit comments to DOC by 24 January 2005. A copy of the FR notice setting out the relevant details is appended (pdf format) to this circular for reference.

Non-investigated Companies' Application for Separate Rates

  1. In lieu of the current arrangement whereby companies are required to fill out a Section A questionnaire for the purpose of determining whether it is eligible for a separate rate, the DOC has provisionally decided that non-investigated companies which request a separate rate would need to make an application which will be streamlined to focus on issues of relevance to separate rate eligibility. Companies will be required to certify their eligibility for a separate rate together with the relevant supporting documents as listed. A draft application is available at the DOC's website (http://www.ia.ita.doc.gov/download/nme-sep-rates/draft-separaterates-applicationv9_1.pdf). The DOC invites comments on the application process and on the draft application.

Exporter-Producer Combination Rates

  1. To prevent evasion of AD duties, the DOC announced in earlier FR notices the proposal of assigning exporter-producer combination rates instead of exporter-specific separate rates as under the current NME practice. The above-mentioned FR notice details the proposal and seeks comments on the proposed change in practice. Under the proposal, an NME exporter qualifying for a separate rate would be required to list out all the suppliers of the merchandise it exported to the US during the period of investigation. An exporter-producer combination rate would be assigned and only apply to the merchandise produced by the suppliers that had supplied subject merchandise to this exporter for export to the US during the period of investigation. Merchandise exported by this exporter but produced by another supplier would receive the NME-wide rate until the administrative review, when factors on this new supplier can be collected for assessing the final dumping duties. Despite this change in practice, the separate rates test would still focus exclusively on the independence of respondent's export activities from de jure and de facto government control.

ENQUIRIES

  1. For enquiries concerning the content of this circular, please contact the undersigned at 2398 5682.




Yours faithfully,



(Ms. Amanda KWONG)

for Director-General of Trade and Industry



Note : While every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of the above information, the Department cannot guarantee this to be so and will not be held liable for any reliance placed
on the same.