Diamond Blade Anti-Dumping Action Affirmed (August 12)

WASHINGTON – Domestic diamond-tooling manufacturers won another round this summer against foreign producers in a five-year battle over the dumping of low-cost goods into the U.S. Market.

On July 6, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) upheld a decision of the U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC) that the U.S. diamond-sawblade industry is threatened with material injury due to unfairly priced imports from China and Korea.

The court’s action reaffirms a 2008 antidumping order which imposes significant duties on all imports of Chinese and Korean diamond sawblades, segments and cores entering the United States after January 23, 2009.

The Diamond Sawblades Manufacturers Coalition (DSMC), an ad-hoc coalition of U.S. manufacturers, originally petitioned the U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC) and the USITC in May 2005 for relief from unfairly-traded imports. A July 2006 ruling by the USITC claimed that domestic producers weren’t harmed by the imported goods.

However, the DSMC appealed the decision to the U.S. Court of International Trade (CIT), which sent the case back to the USITC in February 2008. The USITC later ruled in favor of the DSMC, leading to the antidumping order. Last year, a group of importers and Korean producers appealed the international-trade court’s decision, leading to the CAFC’s ruling last month.

“The CAFC’s ruling should end what has been extremely lengthy and contentious litigation,” said Daniel B. Pickard of Wiley Rein LLP, counsel to the DSMC. “Imported sawblades will now definitively be subject to significant duties. These duties will force imported merchandise to compete on a level playing field with competitively priced U.S. merchandise.

“It’s been a long battle, but in the end, U.S. producers will get the relief they justly deserve and which they are entitled to under the law.”

The appeals court decision, affirming the CIT and the ITC, means that the antidumping order will remain in effect for five years, with possible renewals thereafter. The current antidumping duty rates are as high as 16.88 percent for Korean imports and 164.09 percent for Chinese imports.

The domestic industry may request reviews of these rates on a yearly basis, and the rates can be adjusted upwards retroactively in order to compensate for any additional dumping.

Members of the U.S. manufacturers group bringing the initial action included Blackhawk Diamond Inc. of Fullerton, Calif.; Diamond B Inc. of Santa Fe Springs, Calif.; Diamond Products of Elyria, Ohio; Dixie Diamond of Lilburn, Ga.; Hoffman Diamond of Punxsutawney, Pa.; Hyde Manufacturing of Southbridge, Mass.; Sanders Saws of Honey Brook, Pa.; Terra Diamond of Salt Lake City; and Western Saw Inc. of Oxnard, Calif.

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