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King & Spalding Earns Landmark ITC Decision for U.S. Steel Pipe Industry
26 Jun 2008

WASHINGTON, June 26, 2008 — King & Spalding, a leading international law firm, secured a precedent-setting antidumping and countervailing duty decision on behalf of six U.S. circular welded pipe makers and the United Steelworkers. The decision marks the first-ever countervailing duty order on imports from China and establishes a significant new trade remedy for U.S. industries struggling to compete with unfairly subsidized imports from China.

Chinese exports of steel pipe increased from 10,000 tons to 750,000 tons between 2002 and 2007 as a result of actionable subsidies from the Chinese government. These subsidies and the “dumping” of steel pipe exports into the U.S. market substantially undercut sales, market share and profitability for the U.S. steel pipe industry. Approximately 25 percent of the total workforce employed in this segment of the domestic pipe industry lost their jobs since 2002, when the import surge began. Accordingly, The Ad Hoc Coalition for Fair Pipe Imports From China (which consisted of U.S. steel pipe producers Allied Tube & Conduit, IPSCO Tubulars, Inc., Northwest Pipe Company, Sharon Tube Company, Western Tube & Conduit Corporation, and Wheatland Tube Company) and the United Steelworkers filed a trade action on June 7, 2007, claiming that unfairly traded imports of circular welded steel pipe from China injured the U.S. industry and its workers.

On June 20, 2008, the International Trade Commission voted unanimously that imports of circular welded pipe from China that were found to have been sold at unfairly low prices and to have benefited from Chinese government subsidies significantly injured the U.S. industry. This historic ITC decision will allow an antidumping duty between 69.20 to 85.55 percent to be imposed on Chinese exports of circular welded steel pipe, and will also result in the imposition of countervailing duties ranging from 29.57 to 615.92 percent.

"The high countervailing duty rates show that the United States will not put up with subsidization that undercuts our industries,” said Gil Kaplan, a King & Spalding partner and leader of the team advising on this matter. “It is only because of unfair subsidies that the Chinese steel industry has grown larger than the U.S., the EU and the Japanese industries combined. Hopefully this countervailing duty order will start to reverse this trend.”

King & Spalding’s international trade group, headquartered in the Washington, D.C., and London offices, handles a wide range of international trade and customs matters for U.S. and non-U.S. clients, including trade remedies, World Trade Organization (WTO) matters, Section 337, export controls, sanctions, customs, inward U.S. investment (Exon-Florio/CFIUS), and trade policy and negotiations. King & Spalding received the Chambers USA 2008 Award for Excellence for the pre-eminence and noteworthy achievements of its international trade group over the past year, including outstanding work, impressive strategic growth and excellence in client service.

About King & Spalding
King & Spalding is an international law firm with more than 800 lawyers in Abu Dhabi, Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte, Dubai, Frankfurt, Houston, London, New York, Riyadh (affiliated office), San Francisco, Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. The firm represents half of the Fortune 100 and in a Corporate Counsel survey in September 2007 was among the top firms representing Fortune 250 companies. For additional information, visit www.kslaw.com.


Practice Areas
International International Trade/WTO

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