Twenty-One Dollars a Kilogram, Minimum
The polysilicon proclamation published Tuesday does something no chemical trade action this desk has read does: it sets a floor price at the border and charges you the difference if your entry comes in under it. Plus R-32 keeps its order for another five years, Kaub at 10 centimetres, and twelve days to the Olin vote.
The United States made half the world's polysilicon in 2005. In 2024 it made under two percent of it.
Those numbers are not ours. They sit in the recitals of a proclamation the President signed on August 6 and the Federal Register published on Tuesday, and they are the stated reason for the oddest instrument this desk has seen aimed at a chemical.
Not a duty rate. A price.
Five items this run, all dated since Sunday's radar.
A floor price, not a rate
Proclamation 11052 sets four minimum import prices: $21 per kilogram for polysilicon, $100 per kilogram for ingots and wafers, $0.22 per watt for solar cells, $0.38 per watt for solar modules.
The mechanic is what matters. From 12:01am eastern on December 4, 2026, an importer either files documentation at entry certifying that the first arm's-length US sale of the material will happen at or above the floor, or the goods take a specific tariff equal to the whole floor price.
File the paperwork and land below the floor anyway, and the tariff is the difference.
So the government has written a price into customs law and made the border collect the gap.
There is a separate 15 percent ad valorem duty on derivatives on the same date, capped so that products of Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and EU members reach 15 percent all-in with the Column 1 rate, and 10 percent for the UK. Contracts signed on fixed terms before August 6 are grandfathered.
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