Welcome to the AEC Blog!

Testing - 1,2,3....Is this thing on? The Aluminum Extruders Council is proud to announce the launching of our first blog!

This Shaping Solutions Together blog will feature timely, relevant information written by guest authors who are respected leaders in the industry, as well as staff. Topics will range from Fair Trade Initiative updates to technical information and everything in between.

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Fair Trade Update: Curtain Wall, Door Thresholds & Vietnam

Well, our year is off and running with a bang. Scope issues, Administrative Review, and circumvention top our list in early 2018.

This month we learned that there will be an appeal in the curtain wall scope case. Permasteelisa and Jangho filed a notice of appeal last week. It is expected that Yuanda will almost surely file their own notice of appeal by the deadline, which is February 12. The Chinese industry signaled that they would appeal in a recent article in US Glass magazine.

Additionally, our scope challenge related to door thresholds continues to move forward. This is a significant case because door thresholds are expressly mentioned as subject merchandise in our trade orders. So, to lose this application could open the door to many applications clearly covered by our case. Finally, we continue to await the judges’ (there are more than one judge at the CIT) decision in the appliance handles cases we defended last fall. We believe we will win. However, we are mostly i…

WOW! Did he say ‘Billion’?

The biggest news to hit the trade case came last month. The Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a complaint against Perfectus seeking $1.5 Billion in unpaid duties for the fake pallets exported to the United States. The DOJ didn’t pull any punches in their submission. From the complaint, the DOJ stated, “Zhongtian Liu, a Chinese national, is the founder and chairman of China Zhongwang, one of the world’s largest industrial aluminum extrusion companies. Zhongtian Liu controls and is effectively the owner of Perfectus Aluminum, Inc. (“Perfectus”). Between 2011 and at least 2014, Zhongtian Liu used Perfectus to illegally import more than 2.1 million aluminum “pallets” from China into the United States, as described in detail below.2 The “pallets” were manufactured by China Zhongwang and/or its affiliates and “sold” to Perfectus by several intermediary entities, including Dalian Liwang Trade Co., Ltd., Zhongwang Investment Group, and Yingkou Quianxiang Trading. Many of these intermediar…

Heating Up & Settling Down: The Dichotomy of our Trade Case

The agenda for our trade case continues to be driven by transshipment/circumvention issues and the 232 Investigation. Meanwhile, our ‘base case’ is so quiet that we’ve been able to free up budget dollars from the Administrative Review to finance our circumvention case against Vietnam.

The Administrative Review is now complete. The final rates determined by the Department of Commerce are 86% for countervailing duty (CVD) and 16% for anti-dumping duty (AD). The total of 102% is our highest rate since we first filed the case.

Scope issues have calmed down a lot. In fact, only the curtain wall case, the appliance handles case, and door threshold cases are on the front burner. Reports from the hearing for the curtain wall case were very positive. The attorney leading that effort, David Spooner, is quite confident we will win this round. Of course, we fully expect another appeal from the Chinese. We are awaiting the decision from the judge in the appliance handle cases and believe w…

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