A domestic industry that believes imports are being sold below fair value cannot simply have duties applied. Two agencies must each reach a distinct finding, and the statutory sequence takes many months.
Two findings are required, not one
One agency determines whether dumping is occurring and calculates a margin, comparing export prices against normal value in the exporter's home market.
A separate agency determines whether the domestic industry is materially injured or threatened with injury by those imports.
Both findings must be affirmative for duties to issue. A demonstrated price difference with no established injury produces no remedy.
Calculating normal value is the slow part
Investigators request detailed cost and sales data from foreign producers, covering the product, the period and the transactions at issue.
That data must be verified, sometimes on site, because the margin depends entirely on figures the responding company supplies.
Where a company does not cooperate, the agency may rely on adverse inferences, which is why participation and non-participation lead to very different outcomes.
Preliminary determinations arrive before final ones
The statute provides for preliminary findings at defined intervals, and an affirmative preliminary determination can trigger the collection of cash deposits.
Those deposits are provisional. The final rate is set later, and importers are eventually assessed the difference in either direction.
This staging gives partial relief earlier while preserving the fuller record the final determination requires.
Duties are set per exporter, not per country
Margins are calculated for individually examined companies, with a separate rate applied to others from the same country that were not individually examined.
An importer's duty therefore depends on which producer made the goods, which makes supply chain documentation central to the cost of importing.
Rates are also reviewed periodically after the order, so the applicable rate changes over the life of an order rather than remaining fixed.
Orders expire unless reviewed and continued
Antidumping orders are subject to review after a set number of years to determine whether removal would likely lead to recurrence of dumping and injury.
If both agencies find continuation warranted, the order remains; otherwise it is revoked, and some orders have persisted through repeated reviews for decades.
Countervailing duty cases addressing foreign subsidies follow a parallel structure, and the two are frequently filed together on the same product.