The United Steelworkers Union (USW) has filed antidumping (AD) and countervailing duty (CVD) petitions on dumped and subsidized passenger vehicle and light truck (PLT) tires with the Department of Commerce and the International Trade Commission.
The petitions allege dumping margins as high as 195% for Korea, 147% for Taiwan, 217% for Thailand, and 33% for Vietnam. The petitions also detail numerous government subsidies benefitting Vietnamese tire producers, including loans, tax breaks and grants.
PLT tire imports from these four countries shot up nearly 20% from 2017 to 2019, reaching 85.3 million tires, valued at $4.4 billion dollars, last year, the USW reports.
The USW says it obtained AD and CVD orders on PLT tires from China in 2015, and Chinese imports have since shrunk dramatically, allowing the domestic industry to invest in new capacity in the United States.
Yet importers soon sought out new sources of unfairly traded goods. Chinese producers, desperate for continued access to the attractive U.S. market, also invested in facilities in Korea and Thailand in order to export PVLT tires without paying AD or CVD duties, USW says.
The USW’s petition is also the first petition to contain a currency undervaluation subsidy under new rules the Department of Commerce issued earlier this year, the group says. It alleges that the Vietnamese government’s systematic undervaluation of the Vietnamese dong in relation to the U.S. dollar constitutes a countervailable subsidy.
