15.10.2024

US customs to investigate Sinoboom

The United States Customs and Border Protection agency (CBP) has launched a formal investigation into Sinoboom North America, to determine whether it has been evading anti-dumping tariffs and other duties on the aerial work platforms it has been importing into the US from its plant in Poland.

The investigation was triggered by the Coalition of American Manufacturers of Mobile Access Equipment - largely JLG and Genie - which raised a complaint alleging that there was sufficient suspicion that Sinoboom was evading the tariffs/duties on Chinese built platforms, by importing Chinese built sub-assemblies into Poland, conducting minor assembly work, and then shipping the assembled platforms to the US, misrepresenting them as a product of Poland.

The period of investigation will be for the period from June 26th, 2023 - a year before the ‘coalition’ made its complaint - until the investigation concludes. The complaint and initial investigations was based largely on import statistics which showed a sharp drop in Sinoboom imports from China to the USA corresponding with a sharp rise of imports from China to Poland and Poland to the US. The CBI says there is sufficient suspicion to continue its investigation and look at interim measures to address the situation.

The agency added that so far Sinoboom North America has cooperated fully with its investigations, supplying everything from serial numbers with assembly records, to country of origin documentation and purchasing documents for foreign materials, along with assembly and inspection process throughout the manufacturing and assembly process for each model and serial number.

While this seemed to have passed the local content requirements in terms of physical componentry, the CBP says suspicion remains over the value of Chinese content in each machine which may still classify it as Chinese and not Polish production.

When asked for a comment Sinoboom said: “Sinoboom intends to fully cooperate with this investigation and is confident in its ability to refute the allegations. Indeed, as CBP recognised when initiating this investigation, Sinoboom has previously requested rulings from CBP regarding the origin of its Polish-manufactured equipment which demonstrates this fact.”

“Sinoboom believes in free and fair competition and will continue to support its US customers with high quality products and best in class parts and aftersales service support. We want to reiterate that this investigation will not disrupt our current contracts or sales operation.”
See: US anti-dumping process continues

Vertikal Comment

Earlier this year we visited the Sinoboom plant in Poland, as did most of its distributors, and certainly by then the 'non Chinese' content was very, very high for most models, with high value components made in western Europe, while scissor arms and some other fabrications were being made in India or eastern regions of Europe as well as locally in Poland.

When the critical content value was crossed it is hard to say. Most manufacturers bring components in from all over the world with the percentage of national or imported componentry regularly shifting in recent years, depending on supply chain challenges.

This complaint and investigation appear to come very close in places to being overly restrictive on trade. But the publicly available documentation from the CBP is heavily redacted in terms of the detailed evidence so we really cannot comment on the investigation details with any level of authority.

We will keep a watch on how it develops.