The U.S. government has announced a new tranche of tariffs on solar panel imports from four Southeast Asian nations, in response to complaints from U.S. manufacturers that companies based in the countries are flooding the market with unfairly cheap goods.
The ruling is the second of two decisions expected from the U.S. Commerce Department in connection with a trade complaint filed by the American Alliance for Solar Manufacturing Trade Committee, a group of seven leading solar producers, in April.
The group, which includes South Korea’s Hanwha Qcells USA Inc. and the U.S. firm First Solar Inc., has accused Chinese solar panel manufacturers with factories in Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam of benefitting from unfair Chinese government subsidies, and flooding the U.S. market with panels priced below the cost of production.
According to a preliminary decision released on Friday, Reuters reported, the Commerce Department agreed with the Committee that crystalline silicon photovoltaic (PV) cells and related components from the four nations are being unfairly sold below their production costs in the U.S. Last year, these four countries made up around 80 percent of U.S. imports of solar panels and related components.
It then announced it was imposing duties of up to 271.2 percent on solar cells from the four nations, depending on the country and company in question. The Chinese firm Jinko Solar has received duties of 21.31 percent for products made in Malaysia and 56.51 percent for those produced in Vietnam. Trina Solar, another Chinese company, has been slapped with a dumping margin of 77.85 percent for products it makes in Thailand and 54.46 percent for those it produces in Vietnam. Solar imports from Cambodia face a blanket rate of 117.12 percent, while Vietnam-based exporters not otherwise specified by the Commerce Department are subject to a rate of 271.28 percent.
The announcement comes two months after the Commerce Department issued its preliminary findings from the related complaint filed by the American Alliance for Solar Manufacturing Trade Committee. Accepting the Committee’s claim that solar imports from Southeast Asia are unfairly benefiting from government aid, the Department then announced anti-subsidy countervailing duties on all solar imports from the four Southeast Asian nations.
Like the earlier determination, Friday’s announcement was greeted as a victory by the solar companies and their advocates. “With these preliminary duties, we are moving closer to addressing years of harmful unfair trade and protecting billions of dollars of investment in new American solar manufacturing and supply chains,” Tim Brightbill, the lead counsel to the petitioners, told Bloomberg. Critics have also argued – probably rightly – that the new duties could have negative impacts on American companies that rely on cheap solar imports, while slowing down the U.S.’s green energy transition.
As Reuters reports, the department’s final determinations are set for April 18, 2025, with the final duties subject to change. The Commerce Department’s International Trade Administration is then set to finalize its determinations the following June 2, followed by its “final orders” on June 9.
The two recent decisions are part of a broader, and largely bipartisan, U.S. effort to protect U.S. manufacturers and fight what the Biden administration describes as Chinese industrial overcapacity, particularly in clean energy technologies – a fight that will no doubt continue under the stridently protectionist President-elect Donald Trump.
It also invariably highlights the whack-a-mole nature of such efforts in a world of complex and entwined manufacturing supply chains. As I noted when the first preliminary decision was announced last month, the decision has only been necessary because Chinese firms have responded to earlier U.S. tariffs and duties by shifting production to third countries where such measures are not in place. As quickly as tariffs rise, these manufacturers can be expected to seek out new ways of evading the new duties. They obviously can’t continue to do so forever – but to the extent that Southeast Asian nations have been obvious bases for Chinese manufacturing, and even competed to attract it, the region is likely to come under close U.S. scrutiny in the years to come.