For your information, the U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC) has issued preliminary countervailing duty (CVD) determinations on certain uncoated paper from China and Indonesia.

The DOC preliminarily calculated net subsidy margins for Chinese producers ranging from 5.82 percent to 126.42 percent, and calculated net subsidy margins for Indonesian producers ranging from 43.19 percent to 131.12 percent.  For additional details, including the scope of the investigations, please see the DOC’s fact sheet, found here.

The DOC will instruct U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to collect a cash deposit as security for potential final AD duties, effective with entries that are entered, or withdrawn from warehouse, for consumption on or after the date that DOC’s preliminary CVD determinations are published in the Federal Register.  (We expect that to occur sometime during the week of June 29.)  For imports from China and Indonesia, the CVD cash deposit will be equal to the net subsidy margins calculated by the DOC.

Note that, because the United States operates a retrospective antidumping (AD) and CVD duty assessment procedure, the AD and CVD cash deposits paid at the time of entry may not be an importer’s final liability for AD and CVD duties.  Rather, final liability is established pursuant to the final results of an administrative review, which could occur a year or more after the initiation of any administrative review.  In other words, an importer’s liability could be higher or lower than the cash deposit rate it paid at the time of entry, meaning that the importer could owe additional AD/CVD duties or get a refund of AD/CVD duties, depending on the results of the administrative review.

The next step is for the DOC to issue preliminary AD determinations regarding certain uncoated paper from Australia, Brazil, China, Indonesia, and Portugal.  The DOC has postponed its preliminary AD determinations, which are now scheduled to be made no later than August 19, 2015, and announced the next business day.