The Indian Department of Commerce has launched an antidumping investigation on solar encapsulants originating or exported from South Korea, Vietnam and Thailand.
This comes after a petition was filed by Indian PV encapsulant and backsheet manufacturer RenewSys, which has a major share of the domestic market, as noted in the investigation’s notification published by the Directorate General of Trade Remedies (DGTR).
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The petition was supported by two other companies, Vishakha Renewables and Navitas Alpha Renewables.
According to the petition from RenewSys, the goods that are allegedly dumped into India are “identical to the goods produced by the domestic industry”, adding that there are “no differences either in the technical specifications, functions or end-uses of the dumped imports and the domestically produced subject goods.”
The investigation will cover products exported from South Korea, Vietnam and Thailand during 1 April 2024 and 31 March 2025.
The notification for the investigation can be accessed here. There is currently a 30-day window since the publication of the notification (29 September) for the reception of any information related to the investigation.
Solar encapsulants are used for the adhesion between the PV cell, the glass and the backsheet. There are mainly three types of encapsulants, which are Polyolefin Elastomer (POE), Ethylene-Vinyl Acetate (EVA) and a combination of both, EVA-POE-EVA encapsulant (EPE).
The launch of this investigation comes almost a year after the Directorate General of Trade Remedies (DGTR) issued preliminary antidumping rates on solar glass exported from China and Vietnam. In its preliminary findings, the DGTR had found that seven solar glass producers in China and one in Vietnam had exported products to China that had “injured” the Indian domestic solar glass production industry.
The Department of Commerce assigned dumping margins of between 50% and 90% for Chinese exporters and between 30% and 40% for Vietnamese exporters.
The Indian solar industry itself is not exempt from being the target of an antidumping investigation. During the summer, antidumping and countervailing duty (AD/CVD) petitions from the Alliance for American Solar Manufacturing and Trade were filed against the import of PV cells into the US from India, Indonesia and Laos.
The investigation is currently ongoing, with preliminary determinations to be expected in the coming weeks.
