Dismiss of Nucor Antidumping Case Reversal Rumor

Last week there was news about the “rare reversal” of the antidumping case of Nucor Corporation by the U.S. Court of International Trade (CIT), stating that the dumped import of Chinese and Taiwanese fasteners caused material injury in US fastener companies. Now American Fastener Journal has cleared up the rumor by releasing a statement by trade attorney Matt McGrath (as below):

Dear Fastener Importers:

Some misinformation has been circulating due to a Global Fastener News article (or FIN, I can't tell which), so here's the real story.

The Court of International Trade just released the public version of the decision I reported to you in August (below), so the press picked it up, and Nucor is describing it as a "rare reversal" and declared victory.
You can reassure our friends in Taiwan and China it's all nonsense.

Attached is the court's decision, which is lengthy but boils down to two points: The ITC should not have included one producer's data in the US industry, and they shouldn't have described their import data as "comprehensive." So the ITC must report back to the court on these issues by December 7. On the first point, they already evaluated the data alternatively without that producer included, so they'll just re-state the same conclusion. On the second point, there is no legal requirement that they find the import data to be "comprehensive", so they'll probably just remove the offending adjective. That's it. I see little chance of reversal.

In fact, the Commission published a notice inviting comment from the parties and saying they will not re-open the record. They would probably re-open the record if they had any inclination to change.

If you hear otherwise out in the marketplace, tell them it's baloney. I'm sure we all wish we could win cases and sell fasteners by issuing press releases declaring that black is white and up is down.

Regards,
Matt