On July 20, the Ministry of Commerce of PRC announced that it has receiving the petition and starting the Anti-Dumping investigation for the imports of U.S. and South Korean Solar-grade poly-silicon, and the Anti-Subsidy investigation for the imports of U.S. Solar-grade poly-silicon.

In 2011, the production of domestic poly-silicon is 84000 tones, compared with the 64600 tones for the importing one. 60% of the imports are from U.S. and South Korean.

“They dump their poly-silicon with a price lower than their cost” said by Mr. Fong, the Chairman of Yong Xiang Poly-silicon. “The average of poly-silicon importing price in this May is 27 USD/kg, but the importing price form U.S. and South Korea is 22USD/kg and 27USD/kg.”

They can make such a dumping because they receive a huge amount of subsidies from their countries,” Mr. Fong also said. From the public data, U.S government subsidize local poly-silicon enterprises by kinds of supporting policies; at the same time, OCI, the largest poly-silicon manufacturer in South Korean also receives the huge amount of tax preference and low interest loans from South Korean government.

There are more than 60 poly-silicon manufacturers acting with more than 500 tones capacity in China in 2011 originally, but only less than 10 are still in production in 2012 June. Most of them can’t bear the huge profit loss and shut-down with such a low market price. 

According to the applied document, the dumping margin calculated by the applicant is 54.41% for U.S. and 48.77% for South Korea. Both of calculating measure is comparing with the exporting price to Japan, their second large poly-silicon exporting market. For the Anti-subsidy one, about 20 subsidy policies from U.S federal or state government are indicated in the document, half of them are supplied by Michigan State.

Though there are obvious causes the Chinese poly-silicon makers filled the petition, the main reason that Chinese government start the investigation is considered to revenge the solar cell AD and CVD case in U.S.  Two months ago, DOC announced a 31.14%~249.96% Anti-dumping Duty for the importing Chinese solar cell in the preliminary affirmative determination. And now, the lose-lose trading war seems starting in the bungle sound.