Retroactive Imposition Of Anti-Dumping And Countervailing Duties On Four Southeast Asian Countries
A group of U.S. solar panel manufacturers, including First Solar, Qcells, Meyer Burger, Mission Solar, REC Silicon, Convalt, and Swift Solar, all of which are members of the American Solar Manufacturing Trade Coalition (AASMTC), recently filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Commerce through law firm Wiley Rein. The complaint alleges that imports of solar panels from Vietnam and Thailand have increased as a result of antidumping and countervailing duty (AD/CVD) laws announced earlier by the AASMTC.
The complaint specifically targets retroactive tariffs on solar panels from the time the AD/CVD application was filed in April 2024 until the AD/CVD measures are formally implemented. They claim that there was an increase in solar panel imports from Vietnam and Thailand between the filing of the petition in April and the formal implementation of the anti-dumping and countervailing measures. They believe that Chinese solar module companies in Vietnam and Thailand accelerated dumping to avoid the anti-subsidy preliminary ruling in July and the upcoming anti-dumping preliminary ruling in October.
On the date when the Solar Energy Manufacturers Alliance (SEMA) filed a petition for anti-dumping duties on solar imports, documents showed that solar module imports from Vietnam increased by 17%, while solar module imports from Thailand increased by nearly 40%. Overall, module capacity increased by about 2.6 GW compared to previous months.
Therefore, they believe that this hinders efforts to address dumping and will have a negative impact on the US solar panel manufacturing industry. They also request that the anti-subsidy and anti-dumping duties should be levied from the date of application on April 24, 2024, and the unlevied part should be levied retroactively.