The Trade Remedies Authority (TRA) has recommended a new ‘anti-dumping’ measure of up to 83.5% on excavators imported from China to the UK.
It follows an investigation after a complaint from British construction equipment manufacturer JCB claiming that heavily state-subsidised Chinese manufacturers have increasingly targeted the UK market with cut-price excavators.
In international trade, ‘dumping’ refers to the export of a product at a lower price in the foreign importing market than the price in the exporter’s domestic market.
The TRA said that the proposed duty intends to benefit UK excavator producers by up to £3.4m per year. It would range from 33.03% for sampled producers that took part in the investigation to 83.5% for all other overseas exporters that did not participate.
TRA’s investigation
The TRA received an application in 2023 from JCB Heavy Products Ltd which alleged that excavators from China had been dumped in the UK, causing harm to the UK’s excavator construction industry.
The quango opened an investigation, which found that around 180,000 tonnes of excavators were sold in the UK between 1 July 2022 and 30 June 2023, with the UK industry supplying between 10-25% of this volume. The UK industry’s market share decreased by 11% over this period.
The TRA estimated that during the length of the investigation, UK excavator producers employed around 900 workers and had a turnover of around £500m.
It also found that Chinese exporters were able to use reduced production costs to price their exports below UK competitors, which did not benefit from an artificially low-cost base. It decided that UK prices were undercut by a rate of 23.39%.
TRA’s chief executive, Oliver Griffiths, said: “Excavator production is an important component of the UK’s advanced manufacturing sector. Our provisional finding is that UK producers are being undercut significantly by dumped imports from China.”
