During our Annual Conference in Palm Desert last month we discussed our multi-front battle with Chinese extruders. This included Annual Administrative Reviews, Scope Requests, Lobbying, and Circumvention. I can tell you that 2015 will be an active year in every area. We are in the middle of this year’s Administrative Review, which is our third one since the orders took effect in 2011. There are a couple of key issues to address for the Administrative Review. The first key issue this year is which surrogate country will be chosen to calculate production costs used to establish duties. We have a key opportunity this year because the previous surrogate country, The Philippines, is no longer on the ‘list’. It gives our industry an opportunity to argue for a country whose economic scale more closely resembles China. We fought hard to replace The Philippines in previous years because it was clearly not a good surrogate given China’s economic growth in re...
The Aluminum Extruders Council (AEC) has led the U.S. aluminum extrusion industry in achieving level competition by winning tariff protection that offsets unfair trade practices of extruders/importers of aluminum profiles produced in China. Our efforts have been of enormous value to domestic extruders and suppliers. Conservatively, an estimated 800 million pounds per year of extrusions are being produced in the U. S. that would have otherwise been lost to China.