In preliminary ruling Monday, Commerce officials said they are tentatively setting anti-dumping duties of between 3.5% and 132.6% on pipe from Canada, China, Greece, India, Korea and Turkey. 

“The strict enforcement of U.S. trade law is a primary focus of the Trump Administration. Since the beginning of the current Administration, Commerce has initiated 120 new anti-dumping  and countervailing duty investigations – this is a 216% increase from the comparable period in the previous administration,” the Commerce Department said in a statement. 

The action arose on a complaint from American Cast Iron Pipe Co., Berg Steel Pipe Corp., Berg Spiral Pipe Corp., Dura-Bond Industries, Skyline Steel and Stupp Corp. The group is organized as the American Line Pipe Producers Association, which contends that pressure from unfairly traded imports has forced domestic producers to dial back capacity utilization to around 40%. 

“(The association) is confident that Commerce will continue to investigate the unfairly traded imports by foreign producers in these six countries aggressively,” said Tim Brightbill, a partner at law firm Wiley Rein LLP and the association’s trade counsel. 

“After all necessary information has been provided, we believe the final results of these investigations will reflect the full value of the dumping that has driven harmful volumes of foreign large diameter welded pipe into the United States and taken sales from U.S. producers.”