The U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC) has ruled that U.S.-based solar panel makers have been significantly harmed by a flood of cheap imports from four Southeast Asian nations, removing the final obstacle to the imposition of significant tariffs on these goods.
In a statement issued Tuesday, the three-member Commission “determined that a U.S. industry is materially injured by reason of imports of crystalline silicon photovoltaic cells, whether or not assembled into modules,” from Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand.
As a result of the decision, the U.S. Department of Commerce “will issue countervailing duty and antidumping duty orders on imports of these products,” USITC said. According to a report by Solar Power World, Commerce will issue its tariff orders on June 9, and then Customs and Border Protection “will begin collecting duties on June 16.”
Commerce announced these tariffs last month, after concluding that solar products were being “dumped” into the U.S. market at artificially low prices, and benefiting from unfair government subsidies.
The tariffs varied widely between countries and suppliers, but in many cases were so high as to constitute a de facto import ban. The rates on Malaysian imports ranged from 14 percent to 250 percent, while the Thai tariffs ranged from 375 percent to 972 percent, and those on Vietnamese imports ranged from 120 percent to 813 percent. Some solar panels and components from Cambodia were slapped with duties of more than 3,500 percent because their producers chose not to cooperate with the American investigation. The tariffs on these solar imports will come on top of the country-wide tariffs imposed by the Trump administration last month, which are set to come into effect in July.
The USITC’s decision marks the conclusion of two trade complaints that were filed last year by the American Alliance for Solar Manufacturing Trade Committee, a group representing several major solar equipment producers, including South Korea’s Hanwha Qcells USA Inc. and the U.S. firm First Solar Inc.
The first complaint claimed that solar imports from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam were unfairly benefiting from government subsidies from these governments, and likely also from China’s government. The second accused these companies of flooding the U.S. market with unfairly priced goods.
This threatened the existence of U.S. manufacturers, including many that had been established or expanded with the benefit of tax credits contained in the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, passed in 2020. In 2023, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia exported almost $12 billion worth of solar panels and related components to the U.S., making up around 80 percent of total U.S. imports of these goods.
In preliminary rulings announced in October and December of last year, the Commerce Department ruled in favor of the Alliance, arguing that Chinese firms based in the four nations were circumventing its existing antidumping and countervailing duty orders on solar cells from China.
In a statement cited by Reuters, Tim Brightbill, the lead attorney for the American Alliance for Solar Manufacturing Trade Committee, said that the result would give the U.S. solar industry “the chance to compete fairly.” He added that the USITC’s ruling left “no doubt” that Chinese firms “have been violating trade laws by overwhelming the U.S. market with unfairly cheap, dumped and subsidized solar panels – and they continue to do so from third-party markets around the world, undermining U.S. industrial strategy and stunting new investment.”
Whether this is true remains to be seen. The Solar Energy Industries Association, which testified to the USITC against the petitioners, said that its decision was “concerning for American solar manufacturers” and would harm “solar module producers that depend on access to imported solar cells … Imposing additional tariffs on cell imports at this stage risks stalling progress and undermining the very industry they are meant to support.”
In any event, it is highly possible that these solar manufacturing operations will now simply shift to other third countries, forcing the Commerce Department into a game of international whack-a-mole. The trade data for the past year shows a sharp decline in U.S. solar imports from Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Thailand over the last year, in anticipation of this week’s ruling. Meanwhile, shipments of panels from Laos and Indonesia have trended upwards since the start of the year.
