Last month we reported that we found ourselves in-between announcements from the Administration about a number of issues.  This month we have our answers, whether we like them or not!  Over the last few days the AEC has issued a number of Trade Alerts about the President’s decision to re-impose the aluminum 232 tariffs on Canada. Those new orders will only cover unalloyed, unwrought aluminum.  No downstream products were included in this decision.  Shortly thereafter, Canada retaliated by imposing a 10% tariff on several aluminum related products from the United States, including aluminum extrusions.  Since then, Canadian manufacturers, much like those in the U.S. did, voiced their opposition to Prime Minister Trudeau’s decision.  So, there we have it. After the dust settles, U.S. extruders expected Trump’s reinstatement of the 232 tariffs might bring about raw material price parity with Canada.  Whether that plays out or not is left to be seen....

With the renewal of our trade orders against China a year away, our recent focus in the China case has been on pending scope exclusion requests and reports of transshipment activity. I will briefly discuss those items with you this month. Reflection Window resubmitted its initial scope request on January 9, 2020, in response to the DOC’s supplemental questionnaire of September 23, 2019. Its original request fell under the “finished goods kits” exclusion, and it has resubmitted under that exclusion but indicated that it also intends to submit an exclusion request under the finished merchandise exclusion. We have submitted an extension request for the final determination (currently scheduled for February 24, 2020). This is critical case for our industry. Having won decisively in the curtain wall cases in recent years, now the Chinese are attempting to imitate curtain wall with this hybrid product. We will be watching this case carefully. The AEC is also watching the changes in tariff...

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...