The Vietnam Association of Seafood Exporters and Producers (VASEP) on 11 September said it expects shrimp exports from Vietnam to the United States to gain new momentum after the latter’s final ruling under its 12th administrative review of its antidumping order on frozen warm-water shrimp from Vietnam (POR12).
The U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC) announced on 10 September that the final antidumping duty for the review from 1 February, 2016, to 31 January, 2017, for Sao Ta Seafoods Joint Stock Company (FIMEX VN) is 4.58 percent. That rate will now be imposed on other shrimp exporters from Vietnam, as FIMEX was the only mandatory respondent in the proceeding, according to VASEP.
The final antidumping duty is much lower than the preliminary result of 25.39 percent that DOC had announced in March this year. The latest rate is also lower than the 4.78 percent and 25.75 percent applied on different Vietnamese exporters during the POR11 announced in February last year.
VASEP said in March the DOC had made a “mistake” that had resulted in a much higher-than-expected duty rate for Vietnamese shrimp products during the review. That opinion was echoed by Matt Nicely, a partner with Hughes Hubbard & Reed and counsel to FIMEX and VASEP through the DOC review.
"I think it was an honest mistake. There was a miscommunication between us and Commerce about how we reported the data, and as a result of that, they applied an incorrect conversion where essentially, at one step in the calculation, in effect they created double-headed shrimp," Nicely told SeafoodSource. "We were fortunate that Commerce was understanding of the situation and corrected the problem via the verification."
FIMEX is pleased to no longer have the 25 percent rate "hanging over them," but would have prefered an even lower rate, Nicely said.
"They think [the rate] should be zero," he said. "They're not doing anything differently from what everybody else is doing and as a result, they feel aggrieved by the non-market economy surrogate value system, but that's not new. It's something they've been living with since the beginning of this order. Obviously, they like that the new rate is 80 percent lower than the preliminary rate, because the 25 percent rate would have been catastrophic, but I think it may be a little bit bittersweet in that they were hoping for an even lower rate."
High antidumping duties have depressed shrimp shipments from Vietnam to the United States thus far in 2018. The value of Vietnam’s exports dropped 10.5 percent in the first eight months of the year to USD 372 million (EUR 320.8 million),VASEP said.
The updated rate in the POR12 is expected to help Vietnam’s shrimp exports to the U.S. through the remaining months of this year. As a result, VASEP updated its estimate for the value of its shrimp exports to the United States to USD 615 million (EUR 530.4 million), a 6.5 percent decrease against 2017.
