On July 21, 2025, the US Court of International Trade delivered a decisive ruling in Hanon Systems Alabama Corp. versus United States, rejecting the plaintiff’s challenge and sustaining the US Department of Commerce’s final affirmative determination in its anticircumvention inquiry on aluminium foil imports from South Korea. For India and other major aluminium foil exporters navigating an increasingly enforcement-heavy global trade environment, this ruling is a signal flare of the future, wherein circumvention scrutiny is beyond intent, and about consequence.
Image for representational purposes only
The crux of the case
At the heart of the case was the US Commerce Department’s 2023 determination that certain aluminium foil completed in South Korea using Chinese-origin inputs was circumventing existing antidumping (AD) and countervailing duty (CVD) orders on Chinese aluminium foil issued in April 2018. The original orders had already imposed strict tariffs on Chinese foil to address issues of unfair subsidisation and below-cost dumping.
But US imports of foil from Korea skyrocketed nearly tenfold between the pre-initiation period (July 2012 to March 2017) and the post-initiation period (April 2017 to December 2021), ballooning from USD 42.8 million to USD 459.1 million. During the same window, imports from China plummeted by over 66 per cent.
Simultaneously, according to AL Circle research, historical data suggests that China’s aluminium foil exports have grown consistently over the past ten years since 2014, when the export volume was 867,634 tonnes. So, compared to the volume in 2014, China’s aluminium foil exports rose 79.3 per cent at the end of 2024.
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