The Aluminum Association’s Common Alloy Aluminum Sheet Trade Enforcement Working Group has filed antidumping (AD) and countervailing duty (CD) petitions against 18 countries. The petition alleges that the common aluminum sheets imported into the US allegedly caused material injury to the US economy.
The motion filed on March 9, argues that largely, and quickly increasing volumes of low-priced common alloy sheets were imported into the US between 2017 and 2019 to the detriment of domestic producers. In those two years, the imported material increased by 114pc and almost 750mn lb (340,194mt).
The petitions—which were filed with the U.S. Department of Commerce and the U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC)—follow a February 2019 AD and CD order against common alloy sheets imported from China that stopped the Asian country from exporting around 657.6mn lb of imported common alloy sheets to the US.
According to an Aluminum Association statement, after Chinese imports to the US were affixed with AD and CD duty orders, the country’s exporters began flooding other countries’ markets with the material, forcing those countries to begin proliferating the US market with the low-priced material.
Lauren Wilk, vice president for policy and international trade at the Aluminum Association, said that aluminum overcapacity in China has begun distorting global markets, and that the AD and CD orders bespeak a larger problem.
The 18 countries—Bahrain, Brazil, Croatia, Egypt, Germany, Greece, India, Indonesia, Italy, Oman, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, and Turkey—are accused of dumping margins of 15.90-15.1pc of the imported common alloy alluminum sheets’ value. US producers filed petitions for countervailing duties against Brazil, Bahrain, Turkey, and India, alleging their governments subsidize producers in those countries.