Foreign media reported that AAAMP recently submitted a petition to the U.S. Department of Commerce and the International Trade Commission (ITC), calls for trade investigation on violations of China's anti-dumping law on natural and artificial graphite negative electrodes, and imposes tariffs of up to 920 percent on imported products.

The core accusation of this petition is that China dumped natural stone ink and artificial graphite to the United States at extremely low prices through large-scale subsidies, resulting in overcapacity, disrupting global market prices and causing serious impact on local American producers.

NOVONIX Anode Materials LLC is one of the companies that have publicly joined the AAAMP petition, the NOVONIX plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee Riverside is scheduled to be put into production in 2025. Meanwhile, the company has received a $0.1 billion grant from the U.S. Department of Energy and a $0.103 billion tax credit, used to support its Riverside factory construction.

U.S. producers said that the 25% tariff currently levied by the United States is far from enough to deal with this dumping behavior. According to the net zero emission scenario of the International Energy Agency, global graphite demand is expected to increase nearly four times by 2040, but global supply is highly concentrated in China.

Eric Olsen, spokesman of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Alliance of American manufacturers both said that these practices seriously weakened the competitiveness of American companies and threatened the viability of the domestic graphite industry.

Experts from the law firm Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney PC, which handled the case, estimated the dumping margin as high as 920%, and therefore believed that China could easily absorb the current 25% tariff.

However, the "920% dumping margin" may be seriously inconsistent with the actual situation. China lithium battery industry in the long-term development of each link of the chain, through continuous optimization of technology and management, effective cost control and product increased performance have been realized. In this case, the so-called "dumping margin" does not take into account the value created by Chinese enterprises in terms of technology research and development, production efficiency, scale economy, etc, however, it is not objective and accurate to simply attribute the price difference to dumping.

In terms of the time nodes of the initial investigation of the ITC, within 45 days from the date of submission of the petition, the ITC needs to make a preliminary ruling on whether to cause damage to the domestic industry of the United States. In the case that the initial determination of the ITC is affirmative, the U.S. Department of Commerce shall make the preliminary determination of anti-dumping within 140 days (usually 140 days) from the date of submission of the petition. The final ruling of anti-dumping may be completed by the end of 2025, but the tariff may take effect in advance during the investigation period from the date of the preliminary ruling of the case.