How Four Chinese Producers Became One
The ITC reopened its PVDF exclusion case on October 23. Infringement is settled. What is not settled is whether three of the four remaining Chinese respondents ever imported anything, and whether the patent survives a fight over how to read a titration curve. Submissions close November 6.
The International Trade Commission spent four weeks this summer asking American industry one question: if we shut the border on this battery binder, who here can make it instead?
Zero people answered.
The window opened August 14 and closed at close of business on September 10. The Commission's own notice, in this morning's Federal Register, records the result in a single sentence: "No submissions were filed in response to the Commission notice published in the Federal Register requesting submissions on the public interest from the public."
This desk flagged that window on August 17 and called September 10 the only door through which a buyer's volume enters the file. Nobody walked through it.
So the Commission moved without you, and on October 23 it voted to reopen the two questions that decide how wide the order gets.
Meanwhile the resin itself has been getting cheaper every year the case has run (chart below).
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