Trade Cases

ITA Finds Evasion of P&T Duties Via Vietnam in Final Ruling

November 10, 2023

A US government agency announced this week that certain welded steel pipe and tube products being exported from Vietnam to the US have, in fact, been illegally evading the payment of import duties.

The US Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration (ITA) issued its final rulings in a handful of investigations examining the circumvention of antidumping and countervailing duties (AD/CVDs). The notices were posted in the US government’s Federal Register.

These final rulings by the ITA were unchanged from its preliminary findings issued earlier this year.

The department found that Vietnam has been shipping to the US welded pipe and tube products that were completed using hot-rolled substrate from other Asian countries. This allowed companies to skirt paying the AD and CVDs on pipe and tube from those countries. This is illegal per US trade law.

The ITA ruled that duties are being circumvented on light-walled rectangular tubing from China, Taiwan, and South Korea. The agency said that duties on welded carbon pipe from China, welded standard pipe from India, and welded non-alloy pipe from Korea are also being illegally circumvented.

As a result of the ITA’s affirmative final determinations, imports of the pipe and tube products will now be subject to AD rates of 85.55-255.07% and CVD rates of 15.28-39.01%. These are the margins currently used for Chinese-origin products and are higher than many of the rates the companies initially tried to avoid paying. This penalty is to discourage and “to prevent evasion,” the ITA explained in its final rulings.

The duties will be applied to any of the subject products that entered the country after Aug. 4, 2022. That’s the date the start of the investigations were announced by the ITA in the Federal Register.

The duty circumvention inquiries were opened last year at the request of the United Steelworkers (USW) union and US pipe and tube producers Atlas Tube, Bull Moose Tube, Maruichi American Corp., Nucor Tubular Products, Searing Industries, Vest Inc., and Wheatland Tube.

Laura Miller

Laura Miller is a reporter and editor for Steel Market Update. She has held a variety of positions within the steel industry since 2007, including reporting and editing for Steel Business Briefing/Platts, the Association for Iron and Steel Technology, and Kallanish Commodities, as well as marketing for what was then known as ThyssenKrupp Steel USA (now AM/NS Calvert). After a five-year hiatus working across other industries, she returned to steel in 2021 and has covered the flat rolled, tubular, and trade areas of the industry. She is a member of the Association of Women in the Metal Industries and a past-president of the AWMI Pittsburgh Chapter. She holds a BA in Latin American Studies from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. She can be reached at laura@steelmarketupdate.com or 724-759-7869.