Several WTO member countries have voiced support for Taiwan’s challenge against Canada’s imposition of anti-dumping tariffs on Taiwanese carbon steel welded pipes, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said.
The meeting was in Geneva, Switzerland, on Wednesday and Thursday. Representatives from the US, EU, Norway, Brazil, the United Arab Emirates, China and South Korea attended the gathering and gave their opinions regarding the trade dispute between Taiwan and Canada.
In December 2012, Canada imposed anti-dumping tariffs against seven Taiwanese carbon steel welded pipe exporters, accusing them of selling products at unfairly low prices in the Canadian market.
In June 2014, Taiwan made a formal request for consultations with Canada over the issue. In July and December 2014, Taiwan and Canada held two rounds of talks, but the meetings failed to yield satisfactory results.
In the consultations, Taiwan questioned Canada’s investigation process and its legal basis for imposing the anti-dumping duties, the ministry said.
In January last year, Taiwan asked the WTO to form a panel to review the case, and the organization agreed to set up a review panel in March that year.
The ministry said Canada violated the WTO rules in its anti-dumping investigations by using prices for the products in Taiwan’s market as a whole, instead of just the prices normally charged by individual Taiwanese exporters, to determine that the Taiwanese companies undercut the “de minimis,” or lowest prices allowed to be charged — no more than 2 percent lower than the prices it normally charges.
The ministry said that Canada ignored the de minimis rate from individual exporters, and used Taiwan as a whole to accuse Taiwanese firms of dumping carbon steel welded pipes in its market.
This flaw should lead to the termination of its investigation, the ministry said.
Taiwan also alleges that the Canadian authorities used inappropriate trading statistics to conclude that Taiwanese carbon steel welded pipe exporters engaged in dumping practices, the ministry said.
In the first meeting of the review panel, the US, the EU, Norway, Brazil and the United Arab Emirates said that Canada should have terminated the investigation into the Taiwanese exporters’ alleged malpractices.
Due to the unfair anti-dumping tariffs imposed by Canada, Taiwanese carbon steel welded pipes suffered almost US$20 million in losses per year, the ministry said.
The WTO panel is to hold a second meeting at the end of June before making a ruling, and a final decision is likely to be made in summer next year, the ministry said.
CHIP HANG-UP: Surging memorychip prices would deal a blow to smartphone sales this year, potentially hindering one of MediaTek’s biggest sources of revenue MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip designer, yesterday said its new artificial intelligence (AI) chips used in data centers are to account for 20 percent of its total revenue next year, as cloud service providers race to deploy AI infrastructure to meet voracious demand. MediaTek is believed to be developing tensor processing units for Google, which are used in AI applications. While it did not confirm such reports, MediaTek said its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business would be a new growth engine for the company. It again hiked its forecast for the addressable ASIC market to US$70 billion by 2028, compared
MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip supplier, yesterday said it plans to double investment in data center-related technologies, including advanced packaging and high-speed interconnect technologies, to broaden the new business’ customer and service portfolios. The chip designer is redirecting its resources to data centers, mainly designing application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for cloud service providers. The data center business is forecast to lead growth in the next three years and become the company’s second-biggest revenue source, replacing chips used in smart devices, MediaTek president Joe Chen (陳冠州) told a media event in Taipei. “Three or four years
Motorists ride past a mural along a street in Varanasi, India, yesterday.
Until US President Donald Trump’s return a year ago, when the EU talked about cutting economic dependency on foreign powers — it was understood to mean China, but now Brussels has US tech in its sights. As Trump ramps up his threats — from strong-arming Europe on trade to pushing to seize Greenland — concern has grown that the unpredictable leader could, should he so wish, plunge the bloc into digital darkness. Since Trump’s Greenland climbdown, top officials have stepped up warnings that the EU is dangerously exposed to geopolitical shocks and must work toward strategic independence — in defense, energy and
RSS