Most of the activity this month related to fair and free trade was external to our ongoing trade cases against China. Reports of increasing threats to the North American market from other countries continue to grow, and there is clear uncertainty about the impacts of the 232 tariff exemptions for Canada and Mexico on the U.S. industry. I’ll come back to that in a minute, but first, let me catch you up on issues that did involve our China case. The 8 th Annual Administrative Review is now underway. Having virtually no opposition from the Chinese industry in either our Anti-Dumping (AD) or Countervailing Duty (CVD) cases, we have withdrawn most of our efforts. Instead, we will be focus on individual Chinese exporters whose duties we think we can cause to be increased. This is an efficient use of our resources and similar to the strategy we’ve deployed in recent administrative reviews. As a result, we expect the base rates to stay the same, which a...
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.