313 shrimp firms notified in anti-dumping case

The US Department of Commerce (DoC) has notified 313 Indian shrimp exporters to initiate the second round of administrative review in the anti-dumping case.

The DoC will ask each of the exporters to file details of quantity and value of exports immediately to shortlist the mandatory respondents for the review. The DoC has notified the list of companies from the lists submitted by the Southern Shrimp Alliance (SSA), the original petitioner in the anti-dumping case, and the Louisiana Shrimpers Association (LSA). The SSA had filed a list of 250 Indian exporters, while the LSA list contained 357 companies.

According to shrimp exporters, the DoC will shortlist a few companies from the notified list to avoid the cumbersome procedure of analysing the export data of all the companies. The second administrative review is for a period between January 2006 and February 2007. For the first round of the review that ended recently, the DoC had notified around 360 companies, but finally shortlisted only three companies as mandatory respondents. The three companies "� Hindustan Lever (HLL), the Liberty group and Falcon Marine "� were shortlisted based on their volume of exports to the USA.

The DoC had also notified 40 companies from Brazil, 64 from Ecuador and 142 from Thailand. It had earlier notified the list of companies from China and Vietnam. According to the first review, the weighted average anti-dumping duty on Indian companies had been raised to 10.54 per cent from 10.17 per cent on a provisional basis. China and Vietnam had been awarded lower duties based on the review of their companies' accounts.