ReneSola Ltd., a global provider of solar PV products, elaborated on a pending U.S. Department of Commerce's anti-dumping and countervailing duty investigation regarding certain crystalline silicon PV products from China.
On December 31, 2013, a petition was filed with DoC to initiate an anti-dumping and countervailing duty investigation regarding certain Chinese solar products. This is the second investigation initiated since the first petition was filed at the end of 2011. In 2012, petitions against Chinese-made solar products were also filed in European Union.
Anti-dumping and countervailing duty investigations are commonly used to resolve international trade disputes. The 2011 investigation in the United States was settled by setting certain tariffs on solar modules with cell components produced in China. The 2012 investigation in the European Union was resolved by setting a price floor for Chinese-made solar products.
On March 25, 2014, ReneSola received a letter from the Department in which ReneSola was named as one of the mandatory respondents related to the anti-dumping investigation. According to the World Trade Organization rules, the Department has to guarantee the export quantities of the sampled companies accounted for a certain percentage of the total export sales of China. It is common practice for the Department to selects certain companies with relatively large market share in the United States to participate in the investigation. The Company intends to fully cooperate with the investigation proceedings and to pursue the best outcome for ReneSola, as well as the industry. It is estimated the Department will make a preliminary ruling in June of this year.
"This investigation may result in certain retroactive tariffs being applied on products shipped to the United States within the investigation scope, including modules with Chinese and Taiwanese cell elements, if the Department finds sharply increased Chinese shipments to the United States from March to the preliminary ruling date," said Mr. Xianshou Li, chief executive officer of ReneSola. "In the interests of our clients and investors, we are temporarily reducing our U.S. product shipments in question.
"However, as we mentioned in our recent earnings call, we have overseas capacity through our network of OEM facilities that we can use to continue shipping to the United States without any potential tariff risk. While we oppose the petition raised against certain products from China, we are well prepared and well positioned to meet this challenge and will continue to support U.S. consumers with our top quality module products that are not the subject of the trade proceedings. We are confident that we can continue to leverage our well-deployed global OEM resources and capabilities, and optimize our geographic distribution to our advantage.